Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Television Is Still Terrible

Until our current quarantine began, the last time I had intentionally watched a TV show was when TV sets had knobs, and TV signals came down into them straight from the ether.

I was never one of those self-righteous prigs who boasted of not having a TV. I liked TV very much when I was a kid; it constituted, I would even say, the canon of my first education. I knew it was bad, but it was bad in a way that always seemed to me honest and true, never pretending it was something it wasn’t. It offered, through its obvious artifices, enough truth to impart to a child a fairly good idea of what the world of adults is like: the opera buffa of Jack Tripper’s ruses and Mr. Furley’s exophthalmic fits; little Tattoo, the island, the eternal return of the plane.

I never renounced TV, I mean. It abandoned me, with its ever more complex boxes and wires and remotes, with the subscriptions and customised services that were now obligatory, when TV as I had known it, as I had been born into it, had been an ambient force all around us like the air, always ready to appear in human form to anyone who summons it.

Now when I check into hotel rooms I see the flat screen on the wall, and I know if I turn it on I’ll find some complex textual instructions that will cause my life-long situational illiteracy to kick in. If I happen to guess at the right buttons and get past this part, I will enter an unexplored world of further options, all of which will seem to straddle the strange boundary between the entertainment part of the technology and the revenue-seeking part, and will make me think of ridiculous, foreign Professor Pnin looking in dismay at an unwieldy American newspaper of a Sunday morning, and declaring: “I do not know what is advertisement and what is not advertisement.”

Let us agree for the sake of argument that Breaking Bad and The Wire and the other vaunted representatives of the new golden age of television excel in what is called “raw realism”. Even if this is consistently so, the techniques in question might still be said to bear somewhat the same relation to true dramatic art that recent photographic hyperrealism in painting bears to the Dutch masters. You do not automatically arrive closer to the ideal of an art form by ramping up the verisimilitude. What you get, usually, is the gratuitous display of talent, talent without style, talent wasted: talent, most importantly, that is subordinated to impressive new technologies.

Often in the history of art, what appears at first natural, instinctive, “artless”  turns out only to have appeared so in view of its novelty. Give it a few more decades, and I'm willing to bet that the current fashion for naturalism in television will appear as stylised as Chinese opera. And apart from the question whether it is naturalistic, we may also ask whether it is self-evident that naturalism is something for art to aspire to. It is, after all, a curious thing for art to aim for artlessness -- not that it never should, just that the imperative to do so should not be taken for granted. For every Renaissance Italian painting exhibiting all the hot new techniques of perspective and lifelikeness, there is a highly schematic, rigidly two-dimensional Eastern Orthodox icon that, seen in the right way, is just as capable of inducing profound admiration, and experience of life, as its supposedly more naturalistic Western competitor. The great genius of Eugène Green's films lies in his total abandonment of the aspiration to eliminate artifice. Of course people don't use Molièrean diction on the streets of twenty-first-century Paris. If you want to hear people talking the way people talk in Paris today, then go take a walk in Paris! If you want to see the transfiguration of the commonplace through the cinematic art, go watch an Eugène Green film. 

Anyhow the talk of realism and naturalism in the new critically acclaimed television series is more confusing than anything else. I saw an episode of Better Call Saul, and the Mexican drug-dealer toughs had to my eyes all the verisimilitude of the comically caricatural extras knocked off by Charles Bronson in the Death Wish franchise. I saw an episode of Unorthodox, and the group of musician friends Esty falls in with in Berlin was as two-dimensional as anything I ever saw on an ABC after-school special. I saw an episode of House of Cards, and its sex scene recalled nothing so much as Red Shoe Diaries, that wonderful softcore series on Showtime from the stone age of subscription television, back when it knew how bad it was. What, I kept wondering as I surveyed all of this golden-age output, was the source of all the critical effusions? Why was so much space being given over to it in august venues that used to engage with, say, literature? 

My real problem, anyhow, is not just that it is mostly schlock. My problem is that even when it is well-executed, the adjective one naturally reaches for is not “great”, or even “good”, but only, at most, “successful”. It succeeds on its own terms, but what are those terms? Even when it is technically virtuosic in a way that suffices in the current critical context to earn glowing praise, the question still comes back: to what end? What would the pay-off be for sitting through this? Is there any shred of a possibility of any trace of moral growth, cultivation of one’s sensibilities, expansion of one’s sense of self? Of course there isn’t.

This is not a defense of some pristine art form, “cinema” over low entertainment. For one thing, nominally big-screen movies, even the “serious” ones, have for the most part been pulled down to the same level as the content made for streaming. Natalie Portman’s supposedly high-minded production of A Tale of Love and Darkness (bearing a genealogical relation to, but sharing in none of the same spirit as, the Amos Oz novel of the same name) was, visually and technically, very much like an episode of The Spanish Princess or The Outlander. Circa 1966 you could chart the trickle-down effect from, say, Nouvelle Vague films to the televised Batman series; today by contrast there is a clear and unmistakable evaporation-up, or spilling-across, or just a general moldy spread from television to the movies.

To the extent that this distinction can still be made at all. The closest thing I’ve seen to an entertainment made in the past few years with a passable film-like quality was an episode of L’amica geniale. It was pretty good, as middle-high respectable melodrama with a fair dose of Neorealist nostalgia. (Producer Paolo Sorrentino's La grande bellezza was, similarly, a pretty good ode to La Dolce Vita, while La Dolce Vita was not an ode to anything but to Fellini's own singular vision.) But the merciful thing about Natalie Portman’s movie is that it unfolds within a closed universe: when it’s over, it’s over, and the absence of an internal need to drive the potential binge-watcher ever forward means that it was made without the same algorithmic dopamine-enhancing tricks by which our social-media feeds are also custom-designed to sap us of our humanity. Portman’s film, I mean, in being mercifully self-contained, is also mercifully humane, in the way that cinema has always been, at bottom, humane, while television has always been, at bottom, an exploitation.

The boundary between the forms —the cinematic and the televisual, art and entertainment— is also compromised by the franchises that are increasingly making the experience of movies a serial experience: The Fast and the Furious, or the never-ending additions to the Marvel comics “universe”. Full-grown adults, some of them even my age, have exchanged their dignity in order to live in this universe as eternal children; I even read recently of a newlywed couple that repaired straight from the wedding back to their home to celebrate... by watching a Marvel movie. To say that the passion they are indulging is “as bad as television” does not get anywhere near the bottom of the moral and aesthetic abyss this wedding announcement invites us to sound.

I see the smart young people on Twitter sitting in what I imagine are their extremely expensive, extremely crowded apartments in Brooklyn, tweeting about Game of Thrones, or whatever came after it to instantaneously fill its void, and I think to myself: what did you go to the trouble to move to New York for, to brave all the challenges of life in the capital, when you could have stayed in your parents’s suburban home outside Columbus and watched these same dumb shows with them? What’s the difference where you are if your life is still anchored to substantially the same cultural touchstones as the lives of the people you thought you had to get away from in order to create yourself anew? I understand you don't have a lot of money left over after rent is due. But there are webcams turned on the inside of beaver dams streaming live on the internet, right now, and to watch costs less than your Netflix subscription, and the rewards are infinitely greater. Take a street-view tour of Yakutsk. Watch the cargo-ship GPS trackers, the global wind maps. There's an amazing world out there.

My feeling, after this recent tour d’horizon of the recent wave of critically acclaimed television, is this: if it’s not Hee Haw or The Gong Show or some other ridiculous farce from our pre-internet past, then leave me alone about it. You say the medium has developed of late into an art form? Roy Clark’s fiddling is an art form. Effin’-and-hambone is an art form. That moment when Gene Gene the Dancing Machine’s signature song begins to play and Chuck Barris soars into ecstasy? We arrive with him at the very summit of the artistic sublime.

To despise the unfounded conceits of the middle-brow, of which Emily Nussbaum et al. are the dutiful cataloguers, is not the same thing as to proclaim the superiority of the high-brow. I still love Hee Haw. I wish there were still television being made that could be appreciated in that register. The problem is that today TV is made to be appreciated with the same serious face we were supposed to put on a few years back when Marina Abramović convinced Jay-Z to rap at us under the banner of performance art. It’s the idiot face of people too easily convinced, by other people with lots of financial capital translated too easily into cultural capital, to take something more seriously than it deserves to be taken. If there is anything that preserves the spirit of the Gong Show, it is of course not on television, but on Twitter and TikTok. Those are venues for the true creative genius of humanity (almost exclusively very young humanity), and it is a corollary of this fact that no one mistakes these venues for the sort of place where you have to put on your reverential art-appreciation face.

Lauren Oyler, one of the few lucid truth-tellers among the critics who came up in the generation of new media, has said that while it is wrong to follow fashions in books and visual art, it is acceptable to do so with, say, television and cookery: the idea being that, where nothing is really at stake, there is no harm in going along with the chattering crowd. Her priorities are right, I think. Yet one still must express disdain, not towards those who follow what is not important --where is the harm in that?--, but towards those who seek to artificially inflate the importance of the thing followed. I usually regret expressing my disdain, and revert back to my usual quietism after an occasional outburst such as this one. But if I were truly righteous I would never shut up about it: the content vendors deserve to be driven from the temple of art. 

Punching Down

From the most recent issue of The Point Magazine. To read the whole piece, go here. 

I recently found myself at an academic conference that featured a presentation by graduate students on “combating racism with humor.” We were made to watch a video clip of a theater piece they had performed in connection with an anti-racism event. The skit depicted corporate executives planning an ad campaign associating the efficacy of soap products with their power to make people of color white. I found myself pitying the students. They had obviously overestimated their ability to change the world. But they were also, it seemed to me, tragically unaware of what humor is. They were mistaking it for a tool to be deployed in the pursuit of real-world ends: closing the gap between the powerful and the powerless, ensuring payback time for the fat cats, sticking it to the man.

It is hard to blame them. They were under the grip of a widespread illusion, expressed by Garry Trudeau along with countless others after the murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in 2015, that humor only achieves its highest purpose when it “punches up”—that is, when it involves the powerless kicking back against the powerful. But to insist that a joke is not funny because it punches down is a category mistake. It is to deploy standards of justice where justice is not at issue. We see an analogous mistake when philistines judge that, say, a crucifix photographed in a jar of urine is, to the extent that it is offensive, not art. “That’s not funny” is the comedic equivalent of “that’s not art”—both are statements that can be made only by people who don’t understand the thing they are talking about.

I am entering the silverback stage of life, and at this point it is surely a variety of punching down—or, as we used to say, it is undignified—to berate graduate students. It is getting to be time for me to cede my place to them, I know, and to acknowledge that other meaning of “humor,” according to which young people’s internal passages are coursing with fluids, while the old, as Robert Burton said in The Anatomy of Melancholy, are quite dry. We have different humoral constitutions than the young, and so it is fitting that we should also have a different sense of humor. I happen to be dessicating moreover in a critical moment of history that has compelled me to rethink everything I long took for granted about humor: what it is, what it is for and whom it should target...

Continued here. 

The History of Plants

I will hold the Émile Francqui Chair at the Université Libre de Bruxelles next year. When I learned this my first thought was: Who's Émile Francqui? and my second thought was: I'm guessing I don't want to know. I'm guessing it has something to do with the history of the Belgian Congo.

 

And I was exactly right: in 1885 Francqui was appointed by King Leopold II to go to the Katanga Province as an army captain and a cartographer. Some sources, not least the Fondation Francqui, report that their namesake was active in combatting slavery, but what this seems to mean is that he was engaged in the Congo Arab war of 1892 against Zanzibari 'Arab' slave traders fighting for control of the Congo Free State.

Francqui's principal adversary was the Zanzibari ivory merchant, slavetrader, and memoirist known as Tippu Tip, a nom de guerre derived onomatopoeically from the sound of his gun. It is unlikely that Tippu Tip saw Francqui as any more enlightened than he was, but instead took the war as having to do only with control of territory. For his service there, Leopold would send him onward to China, to represent Belgian interests in the burgeoning mining industry.

As I was reading this part of Francqui's biography, I realised the name was vaguely familiar. A few months ago I was engaged in some minor research on the natural-philosophical and, shall we say, eudaimonistic writings of the 31st president of the United States, Herbert Hoover, beginning with his translation in 1910 of Georg Agricola's 1556 work De re metallica, and right up through his 1963 swan song, Fishing for Fun-- And to Wash Your Soul.

I had checked out through interlibrary loan from Bavaria the only physical copy of this latter book known to exist on the European continent, and had to give the ILL librarian a special pleading look as if to say, "What? This is research too."

The fruits of the Hoover research will be made public, in Cabinet Magazine, soon enough, but here what is noteworthy is the small detail of his own passage through China, in the first years of the 20th century, having even fought in the Boxer Rebellion in Tianjin in 1900, alongside his wife, Lou Henry. And who would become his great rival in the struggle for control of the Chinese mines? The Belgian industrialist and envoyé of the king, Émile Francqui.

Some years later still, after the outbreak of World War I, Francqui and Hoover would collaborate to direct and manage the Commission for Relief in Belgium, offering food supplies to refugees of the German occupation. One of the principal thoroughfares in Brussels today is the Boulevard Herbert Hoover, which I remember from the mid-1990s, when I briefly had a Belgian girlfriend and flew to Brussels from New York on a Pakistan International Airlines flight that made a brief stopover for refuelling in Europe before continuing on to Karachi. She, a Francophone, had disappointed me for her total lack of interest in the language of the Flems, and would not indulge for a second my attempts to translate the Dutch part of the bilingual cereal box.

I disappointed her for other perhaps more profound reasons, but anyhow I have been surprised, recently, to find these two men, Francqui and Hoover, meeting again, not just in Brussels during the Great War, after their period of enmity in China, but also, a century later, in my own curiosity, my own wandering from this topic to that.

Belgium has its Francqui Foundation, and the United States has, at Stanford, its Hoover Institute. If you accept an affiliation with the Hoover Institute you can expect to be unfriended by your cool friends, the ones who post links to new books from Verso and who rigorously practice the hermeneutics of suspicion, about pretty much everything: the New York Times, Disney cartoon princesses, Miley Cyrus twerking. Accepting to be associated with the name of Émile Francqui seems somewhat less charged, though in truth the men seem to have been very much alike.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I err through life, taking opportunities as they come, accepting invitations, without much suspicion, but also without the hopefulness young Herbert Hoover surely felt as he set out to impose order and progress in the world. As a topic for the lecture series I’ll give in connection with the year-long chair, I have proposed: "What Is a Plant? Philosophical Reflections from Aristotle to Goethe." The world is going up in flames, there is a coming global order of idiocy and barbarism, and, like Herbert Hoover with his history of metals, though without the optimism, I have chosen to focus on the history of plants. I want to wash my soul of the history of men.

Trump: Not Just a Vulgarian

 Trump's suspected Russian connections have generated a small flurry of interest over the past few days, in the wake of the reports that Putin's agents may be behind the DNC e-mail hack. It is nearly certain that this mini-scandal will fade within the next few days as Americans, living in the eternal present, lurch on to the next shiny thing. 

I would like very much for this story not to recede. Trump has today both announced that he has "nothing to do with Russia whatsoever," and then in a public speech a few hours later made a jaw-dropping request to Putin to help in finding Hillary Clinton's 30,000 missing e-mails. Commentators are wondering whether this constitutes treason, but we can anticipate that the evidently sarcastic tone of the request will provide plausible deniability. Haven't we learned by now, anyway, that Trump can say anything?  

Prior to today's events, Masha Gessen, the English-speaking world's most lucid critic of Putin, published an article in the New York Review of Books denying exactly what I've spent the last two days trying to argue (e.g., here) --that Trump is, in a broad sense, an agent of Putin-- but I'd happily concede that point to someone who has "spent a good third of [her] professional life working to convince the readers... of both Russian and American publications that Vladimir Putin is a threat to the world as we know it." I think though that she creates a false dichotomy when she says that fixating on Trump as an agent of Putin is a "way to evade the fact that Trump is a thoroughly American creation that poses an existential threat to American democracy." I see it more as a way to make that same case, and to place it in a global context, which includes not only Putin but, only somewhat more distally, ethnonationalist autocrats like Erdogan and Modi. The point is to understand the genus that is casting forth all these new species in different national habitats, not to blame any one of them for the others.

Clearly, whatever your theory of the DNC hack, when Trump says that he has "nothing to do with Russia whatsoever," this can't be true. His multiple, publicly acknowledged ties with Russian business and with pro-Russian lobbies do not count as 'nothing'. So, once again, he's lying. Putin wants him urgently to be president of the US. Whether or not he is directly an agent of Putin, he is our national mutation of a rapidly speciating genus that includes Putin, indeed that includes him, I would say, as its type species. The fact that 'it can happen here', or that 'we have our own home-grown troubles to worry about', does not mean that there is not a global context for these local troubles that must also be understood. The fact that the global context of this particular trouble is one that reveals strong affinities, whether elective or not, between our home-grown politician and ethnonationalist autocrats in Russia, Turkey, India, and elsewhere, is one that it seems to me might be salient in conversation with friends and relatives who are operating under the illusion that there is something patriotic about voting for Trump. And yet so many people I have read or spoken with are downplaying or denying the Russian connection, even calling it red-baiting. As if there were anything red about the Putin regime: it is an ethnonationalist autocracy! Even if you think patriotism is vulgar, surely you can understand how, by making this Trump-Russia association stick (again, a real association, whether he is Putin's paid agent, useful idiot, or just a species of the same genus), we might hope to help reorient those people who believe patriotism is noble and believe they are acting on their patriotism by supporting Trump.

The recent talk of Trump's relations with Russia reminds me of Obama's attempt to roast the Republican candidate at the most recent press correspondents' dinner by observing that his experience in the domain of foreign relations consisted in bringing the Miss Universe contest to Moscow. Trump himself has boasted that this work indeed gives him special knowledge of Russia. What Obama's joke misses, and what our mockery of his boast misses, is that in the Russian mafia regime the event presided by Trump qualifies as a high-level affair of state. Ceremoniously judging women, and projecting one's power over them to the entire empire, while simultaneously torturing or threatening to torture the men, just is governance. Consider for example the activities of Ramzan Kadyrov, who is technically some kind of regional governor but in fact is a common warlord implanted in Chechnya in exchange for his promise of fealty to Putin. Kadyrov apparently serves on various committees (e.g., the Advisory Commission of the State Council of the Russian Federation), but the actions in virtue of which he maintains his power are things like shooting guns in the air, collecting sport cars, throwing money at women dancers during parties, showing off his own talents in dancing a lezginka, and maintaining active and plausible rumours of the existence of torture chambers in his realm. Notoriously, Gérard Depardieu sought to signal his je-m'en-fichisme towards the French Republic and toward Western high-mindedness in general by himself displaying fealty toward the Chechen warlord, even dancing a lezginka of his own. 

Trump is one of these people. In his unhinged displays, in his flirtation with the Russian mafia state and all it symbolises, he is more like Depardieu than like any conservative politician the United States has ever known. It misses the point to call him a 'vulgarian'. Lyndon B. Johnson was a vulgarian, and he was also perfectly competent to serve as president of the United States (however awful his aggravation of the Vietnam War). Trump is, rather, someone who doesn't simply like wrestling and beauty contests, but who has no moral or intellectual ability to comprehend a vision of politics that is not fundamentally modelled on these base spectacles. He is an aspiring warlord, an aspiring mafioso, an aspiring vassal of Vladimir Putin, who for his part must at present be delighted and stunned to see the United States collapsing in just this way. 

Trump Is an Agent of Putin

The evidence has been accumulating for a long time now --the connection to Yanukovych's former advisor Paul Manafort, the apparent Russian hacking of the DNC, the flippancy about NATO's responsibilities in the Baltics, the general conspiratorial tenor that sounds so much like a typical invited loon on the RT network, the mutual public praise-- that Trump is, at least unwittingly, an agent of Putin.

Whenever I try to bring this up as potentially damaging, Americans keep telling me that the Putin connection can't be made into a campaign issue, since "Trump's supporters don't really care about foreign policy." But that can't really be true. Surely they care about possible future foreign policies that diminish US sovereignty, or that shift the balance of geopolitical power in the world towards an autocratic Eurasia. It seems to me that the real problem is just poor information in the US: Americans seem to believe that Russia ceased to exist in 1991, that Gorbachev just gave up and closed up shop. This perception only strengthened after 2001, when US triumphalism over the fall of communism in the 1990s fused with racism and 'civilisational' bigotry to convince Americans that the Arab and Muslim world was the principal geopolitical hotspot in the world.

Tellingly, Slavic-studies departments in US universities downsized, and enrolment in Arabic courses skyrocketed (studying Russian in the early 1990s, we still got to use military-issue textbooks with helpful phrases about nuclear summits and fallout shelters). But this indifference only goes one way: Putinite ideology, while also working when expedient to cultivate small autocrats such as Le Pen fille or Viktor Orban, is monomaniacally focused on the US, all the nuclear weapons are still there, and of course Putin is interested in helping to install a leader in the US who has given up on the post-war Atlanticist liberal-democratic order. There are surely among Trump's supporters some horseshoed ideologists too paranoid and incoherent to be classified as either left or right. One such is Alex Jones of InfoWars fame, who would find a Putinite world amenable to them precisely because it rejects the liberal-democratic order that they see as a great hypocrisy and a lie. There are many of these people who may at first have had some progressive spirit about them, but who are too thick or too morally cretinous to allow their anger to be shaped by anything that resembles a principle: like a certain relative of mine whom I saw in 2002 wearing a t-shirt with a big tacky likeness of Yasser Arafat on it, and who by our next and last visit in 2006 was convinced that 'the Jews' are spraying us with chemtrails. I don't know what this kinsman of mine thinks about the current presidential elections, but I can say that it is his type that makes up Trump's base: those who are as far beyond placement on the ideological spectrum as we have understood it since the French Revolution as they are beyond rationality and decency.

But there must also be many, many Trump supporters for whom American anti-Soviet ideology of the 20th century remains a living memory and a still recoverable orientation in their understanding of what might actually constitute an existential threat to the country they claim to want to make great again. To try to convince these people of the extreme danger of a Trump presidency seems to me a worthwhile effort to make right now, and not to be shrugged off simply because Trump's supporters are supposedly too stupid to 'care about foreign policy'.

One often gets the impression that it is in fact the American left that finds it hard to think about foreign policy. I'm astounded, in particular, to see my friends on the left flatly denying that Russia could possibly be interfering in US electoral politics. Say you're glad Russia is interfering, or say you think there's no reason they should not interfere, given how much the US interferes around the world (yes, I'd even be happy to hear another invocation of the fallacy of relative privation, or 'А у нас негров линчуют', to adapt the Soviet slogan into the first-person plural, if the only alternative is flat-out denial of evidence). But why reject out of hand the possibility that Russia in fact seeks to play an active role in the electoral politics of other countries?

This role has been long and well established in Estonia, Hungary, France, and other European states, and there is no reason why, given the Internet-based nature of the interference, Russia should not expand its understanding of the ближнее зарубежье or 'near abroad' to include its principal 20th-century rival. Everywhere is 'near' when your preferred form of warfare is hacking. Americans seems surprised that Russia would engage in such low manoeuvres. My Bulgarian friends, meanwhile, are surprised to see that Americans think any of this is news. The only difference is that it is not some small former vassal state, but the superpower that supposedly became a hegemonic hyperpower a generation ago, that is now learning what Eastern Europe experiences all the time.

I used to find the most productive forums to be the ones, as Victor S. Navasky hoped for The Nation to be, in which liberals and leftists explore their differences, and find out what they have in common in order to help shape a better world together. Since the rise of Trump I've started to feel that the most productive conversations are those one might have with the 'decent right', all the Republicans who have stood up against Trump and really understand what an existential threat he poses to the United States.

Whatever the direct or indirect links, Trump is a Putinite. Putin, and all the other ethnonationalist and autocratic leaders throughout the world that I can think of, want to see Trump elected. Russia is not a joke, especially not for those of us in Europe who sort of remain attached to the post-war liberal-democratic order and don't want to see it overturned by people who don't just fail to live up to its aspirations --most importantly the aspiration to individual rights and freedoms--, but fundamentally reject those aspirations. Trump is not a Republican, or a conservative. He is an autocrat in the 'Eurasianist' mould elaborated by Aleksandr Dugin and tacitly supported by Putin. The Americans who seem to understand this most clearly are the commentators from the center right, those who rightly or wrongly continue to believe that there really is a way of failing to do one's part in American civil society that might be denounced as 'un-American', and one does not have to be a paranoid McCarthyite in order to see this. They correctly see Donald Trump as un-American.

Meanwhile the American left seems to think Russian cyberwarfare is not a real thing at all, either because they believe the myth forged in the 1990s that the US 'won' the Cold War and that Russia has been taken care of, or because they think it makes them look bad-ass in front of their friends to pretend they believe that anything at all, even the global triumph of Putinism, is preferable to the business-as-usual of American-led neoliberal oligarchy.

At the same time, all of those who posture in this way claim to be deeply concerned with the rights and freedoms of all people, particularly persecuted ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. But under a Hillary Clinton presidency, however crappy her brand of corporate elite rule may be, you or your loved ones will not end up in a labor camp in Oklahoma wearing a pink triangle. By contrast this is a real possibility under a Trump presidency, and there is no source of moral authority in the global order whose ascendancy Trump's election would clinch to which we might appeal to help you get out. Liberal-democratic rulers, for all their hypocrisy, still speak a language in which it makes sense to say things like, 'This is not right', 'This is unjust'. They understand what these expressions mean. Trump and Putin don't speak this language. They are on the same side. Putin knows this, Trump might know it. And Putin is in fact capable of acting on this knowledge to shape the world in his image.

The Internet's Funeral Cryers

July 15. How nice it would be to see neither facile whataboutism (‘What about Baghdad?!’, ‘What about Istanbul?!’) nor the futile sentimentalism of temporary tricolour profile photos and #jesuisnice hashtags. These displays are not the harmless sideshow of helpless bystanders; they are part of the causal mesh that keeps these attacks happening. There is by now a fully routinised social-media cycle that gives us first a raw explosion of sentiment, then scoldings about what we’re failing to be sentimental about; then a lull, a vacuum-like feeling that we could really use another spectacle to focus our sentiments on. This is the same feeling that makes us so ebullient when celebrities die, since their deaths give us an occasion to display how much we loved them, or maybe to tell of the time we met them and how much they helped shape our own work. We are not (yet) actively killing celebrities, but there are plenty of young men with nothing to lose who are happy to kill children watching fireworks on a beach promenade, or revellers at concert halls or nightclubs, to give us something to do with our sentiments for the next few days. The time-lag is getting shorter and shorter, and the Internet is getting hungrier. If the ‘What about x?!’ formula as it is usually employed picks out, in its inarticulate way, a real geopolitical bias, there is another bias, a chronological one, that the Internet in its perpetual present fails to detect: we might as well, already, be crying out, ‘What about Orlando?!’, ‘What about Paris last November, or last January?!’ Very soon, Nice will seem like it happened a long time ago too. It is a dishonour to the victims to repeat the ritual motions of public outrage and indignation and sanctimony about double-standards that together serve to pack the event up, tie it off, and despatch it into the irrelevant past. This is a political crisis and it needs analysis and political solutions. In particular, it needs us to fight against the rise of ethnonationalist politicians in Europe and America who are, whether they know it or not, collaborating with the attackers to bring civil society down in flames.

UPDATE, one day later: The Internet is now crying 'Istanbul!' though for reasons that could not have been anticipated yesterday when it was crying 'What about Istanbul?!' Nice has already retreated into the past, it is already unfashionable to offer a public display of sentiment about it. Today's cry of 'Istanbul!' will not be heard however as an answer to yesterday's 'What about Istanbul?!' No one ever really expects an answer to that question. The real question is always, 'What's next? Where can we lurch to next to show off our sentiments, like funeral cryers in plague time, delighted that business is so good?'

Notes on a Hoax

I have been called upon to help to introduce to an English-speaking readership the recent hoax carried out by my friends and colleagues, Philippe Huneman and Anouk Barberousse, who submitted a fake and preposterous article under the fictitious name of Benedetta Tripodi to the Journal of Badiou Studies, a forum dedicated to research on the work of the French philosopher Alain Badiou.

Let me begin by saying that I am no more interested in taking sides in this conflagration than in the one that transpired between Pierre Gassendi and Robert Fludd some centuries ago as to whether or not eclipses can help us predict the course of human affairs. I tend to see conflicts in the world of ideas from a distance, as an outsider, without a stake. This is not because I don’t have convictions of my own —I do— but because in general I don’t think these convictions are best pressed for by taking sides and by battering adversaries. This is in part because, like Leibniz, I believe that everyone is in some sense right, and that it is just a matter of clarifying the terms in which we express our views; and in part because, like the Skeptics, I believe that everyone is in some sense wrong, and doesn’t have a clue what the hell they’re talking about.

Alain Badiou, we may at least say, does not draw much from either of these legacies. He seems fairly certain that his own adversaries are substantively wrong, and if he does not take from the Skeptics the cautious attitude toward his own views that he may not know what the hell he is talking about, he at least ensures that many of us, who are not he, will not know what the hell he is talking about.

This, I suspect, is not a glitch, but rather is central to the program. Scholars of religious studies have often identified something similar in the dogmas of sects: it is not in spite of the fact that a Christian cannot possibly make any sense of the claim that God is three and one at once that he or she continues to have faith; it is because of this core mystery that Christianity has such a hold on the believer’s soul. One need not deal in claims about the transcendent realm in order to draw followers to a movement in this way. I have suspected for a while that some of what is done under the banner of ‘disability studies’ functions like a sort of religious sect to the extent that it insists on incompatible commitments, and distinguishes between insiders and outsiders by noting who is willing to keep quiet about the incompatibility. For example, not every disability can be equally accommodated in a given public setting; to make a room accessible to vision-impaired people by means of bright fluorescent lights might make the room less accessible for people prone to migraines. There are trade-offs in life, outsiders will say. That is a concession to ableism, reply the insiders, grim-faced. Replace 'migraines' with set theory, and 'vision-impairment' with communism, and you have a fairly good sense of how Badiousianism works. 

Badiou may not be a 'postmodern', he may even, as he insists, despise postmodernism. Yet I can report, at least, that my experience attending his talks has been remarkably similar to what I've felt when trying to listen, some years ago now, to Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy: I feel as though I am interrupting something, an intimate moment between old friends, grudgingly tolerant of the anxious young aspirants swarming around them trying to gain their attention, and completely indifferent to those who are neither in the inner circle nor hoping to enter it. I should add that I do not have this feeling in other academic settings where I am a relative interloper: I can go to a conference on palaeoanthropology or on Shakespeare, and I can see that the participants all go way back together and are part of what is in many respects a club, and yet there remains this external thing --palaeoanthropology or Shakespeare-- that does not belong to them, that they recognise as something that strangers care about, and that justifies my presence there as well as theirs. 

I suspect anyhow that mysterianism is a necessary and ineliminable part of the way people come together around common visions, and that in themselves they are neither good nor bad. So I will not join my friends Huneman and Barberousse in criticising the Badiousians for their apparent inability to make it all cohere. Some collective projects, even collective projects motivated by big ideas, do not share this desideratum.

My first reaction to both Huneman and Barberousse’s canular, as well as to Badiou’s ferocious response, was a deep sincere laugh. But this reaction quickly gave way, in each case, to some substantial concerns. To turn first to Badiou’s reaction.* He used some great words: sous-fifre (an underling, a lowly non-entity), for example, and he made the authors of the original text look pretty foolish and vain, motivated by nothing more than base ressentiment. But then it struck me: Badiou is some years older now than Socrates was at the time of his trial, when he asked ironically if those who had accused him really expected him to fight back, now, at his age, to petulantly insist that the accusations are unfounded. As if to convince anyone of this would thereby win him immortality! Socrates did not do this, to have done so would have been completely out of keeping with his character.

What sort of distinguished old men, what great silverbacks on top of their fields, be it statesmanship or letters or philosophy, do fight back? The ones with thin skins, the ones for whom influence can only go together with power, rather than than with the cultivation of an exemplary life. This is the reaction, mutatis mutandis, of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who does not like being lampooned by a bawdy comedian. It is the reaction of American philosophy blogger Brian Leiter, who, in his words, must yearly ‘plan out [his] litigation strategy’ in order to bring some peculiar version of justice to all those he sees as having committed ‘per se defamation’ against him. It is the conduct of small tyrants (i.e., all tyrants), not of philosophers, and especially not those who have made it to the august age of the senex. If you think the people who mock you really are sous-fifres, then why on earth should you let them eat at you so? You’re almost 80 years old, Badiou. Congratulate the hoaxers on their small victory and let it pass. Aquila non captat muscas. 

But what sort of victory is it? Here my laughter on first reading Huneman and Barberousse's text quickly gave way to two concerns. One is that the joke is not so much on the abstruse theory-heads, as had surely been the case in the Sokal incident. The joke isn’t on anyone who is committed to any particular ideology or style of thinking at all. The joke is, rather, on the folks running these pop-up online journals with their ludicrously low editorial standards.

Remarkably, the editors of the Journal of Badiou Studies even admitted as much when they complained of Huneman and Barberousse’s ‘dated’ method of attack “in an age when the pressures on independent Open Access publishing include underfunding and time-pressured staff.” In other words, the editors effectively confess that they do not have the resources to produce a decent journal on their own, and so must rely on the good will of the contributors to not send them crap.

But many people who submit to journals are not in a position to know of their own work whether it is crap or not, and for this reason alone a journal that does not have the resources to weed out crap would be doing scholarship a far greater service by simply not existing. The problem is compounded in the context of continental European publishing in English, where often, at every stage of production, from writing to proofreading to publishing, all of the people involved speak English, at best, as a second language. What slipped through at the Journal of Badiou Studies does not in fact look so different from what slips through on a regular basis at Springer or Brill.

Incidentally, no one so far has explained whether that curious word ‘Strive’, being used as a noun in the title of the hoax article, is part of the hoax, or whether it is part of the more general context of continental pseudo-English in which alone such a hoax could occur.

It seems to me in other words that what this hoax exposes is not so much Badiou, or his gullible acolytes, but rather the dismal state of publishing today— or perhaps we should not dignify it in this way, and instead call it what it is: posting. The Journal of Badiou Studies is a website masquerading as an academic journal. It has an editorial board (of which Badiou himself is a merely ‘decorative’ member), but it is run rather more like the Huffington Post or, dare I say, The Guardian: it is a place that lets people deposit stuff they have written, and then call it a ‘publication’. In this respect it is not clear whether what Huneman and Barberousse have exposed is something much smaller, or much bigger, than what Sokal exposed twenty years ago. Sokal exposed an elite and illicit hot-air factory; the most recent hoax exposes something that we should all already know about but somehow need to be reminded of: there is no such thing as academia anymore, but only countless fly-by-night ventures ensuring that everyone gets to play along.

If there had been any editorial standards at all the journal’s representatives could at least have checked up on the author. In spite of Huneman and Barberousse’s claim, the University of Iași is not off in some inaccessible fantasy world. It is a university in an EU country, with multiple exchange agreements with campuses of the University of Paris. I myself have visited there and know several good philosophers who hail from there. If an article had been submitted to me purporting to be by someone from Iași named ‘Benedetta’, I would immediately have suspected something was wrong.

Here I am reminded of a similar hoax in 2010, when --to cite Perry Anderson-- the crass booby Bernard-Henri Lévy referenced a certain Jean-Baptiste Botul, a supposed expert on Kant, as a source for his own work. It was only later revealed to him that the school of ‘botulisme’ was invented, as a joke, by a French journalist. Botul was supposed to have been particularly influential among the neo-Kantians of Paraguay: a sort of ruse that was supposed to make all readers in France shrug their shoulders and say, ‘What do I know about Paraguayan neo-Kantianism?’ At the time a close friend of mine, an Argentine philosopher who was well traveled on the South American philosophical conference circuit, felt the need to protest that he did in fact know quite a bit about the Paraguayan neo-Kantians, and that from his point of view the whole farce about Botulisme rang completely and obviously false. Romania and Paraguay, I mean, are not just places in the French imagination. They are also places, real places with real philosophers, whose real existence makes the invocation of these places for the purpose of a hoax seem to fall particularly flat. If I may say one good thing about Badiou here, it is that he does seem to be sharply aware of the real existence of Iași, and Asunción, and of the fact that there are real people in those places engaged in real thinking.

One final point about Huneman and Barberousse’s intervention: it is not, it seems to me, nearly so nonsensical as its authors take it to be. This might be a general problem with hoaxes, or it might by contrast be a compelling argument for their proliferation: satirical imitations of the way people who take themselves seriously talk are also reflections of the way they talk. With time and distance these reflections can turn out, for the purposes of understanding what a given intellectual current is all about, to be just as useful as, or even more useful than, the productions of that current's straight-faced partisans. Lucian of Samosata is a valuable resource for the study of Greek philosophy, especially where the texts he is satirising have gone missing. Similarly, I take it that some generations from now Tripodi's contribution to the Journal of Badiou Studies will have turned out to be a real contribution to Badiou studies, notwithstanding the intentions of her creators. Huneman and Barberousse have succeeded in studying the dreary idiom of the Badiousians attentively enough to be able to convincingly channel it. I take it that we can learn something about this idiom from their contribution, and that in time the spirit in which it was generated —contrarian rather than aspirational-sycophantic— will matter less and less.

I am a strong supporter of hoaxes. I think they are healthy and necessary, and I have been involved in some myself. I am not convinced that the nature of their salutary effect is that it sets us back on the right path: the path of straightforward, serious, straight-faced inquiry. I suspect rather that they are an intrinsic and ineliminable part of of the project: the part that has to be there because love of truth is not just a grim and pursed-lipped thing, but a playful one too.

Who comes out of this incident grim-faced and dour? Badiou, certainly. The editors of the website that calls itself a journal: they come out looking simply sad, perhaps in need of a break. Philippe and Anouk just look busy now, dealing with the cascade of further writing responsibilities their initial volley has precipitated, and articulating what to my mind are some fairly compelling points about the need to stir things up as they have. Me, I'm just happy to pass all this along, and to get back to reading Gassendi and Fludd.

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*Here is Badiou's reply:

"I never read Badiou Studies, of course, and my 'presence' on the editorial committee is --this should be obvious to you-- of a decorative nature. What strikes me in all this is the total ignorance of my work revealed by the maneuvers of these two would-be philosophers who have gone astray in their little machinations. It is, for any serious reader, absolutely idiotic to identify me with the 'postmodern', the rhetorical vacuity of which I have denounced many times. I am a classical thinker, conceptual, deductive, systematic, everything the 'postmoderns' despise. As for questioning my competence in mathematics: this is precisely what no mathematician has done. I even have a feverishly admiring letter from Jean Dieudonné (concerning my book about Number), a particularly severe man, who hails, precisely, the contrast between my competence in this domain and the ignorance of most 'philosophers', notably those in the analytic school who love to talk about science and logic. Of course, mathematicians can criticise the metaphysical use I have made, like Plato or Descartes or Leibniz, of their discipline, But they cannot criticise me for not knowing it. It is enough to open Being and Event or The Logic of Worlds, in order to appreciate that I give the entire proof of all the theorems that I mention. It is quite natural that these two underlings of academic philosophy are angry that in the whole world no one cares about their existence. That they transform their humiliation and ressentiment into low intrigues: Nietzsche teaches us that this is practically inevitable."

Charlie Hebdo Drops a Bomb

After a 2015 filled with near constant polemics on the subject, I had hoped to retire from discussing Charlie Hebdo, at least in English. But on Sunday the French magazine posted on its website an evidently non-satirical editorial, in English, seeming to make explicit the Islamophobic convictions that had motivated the cartoons that provoked the murder of its principal contributors on January 7, 2015. The anti-Charlie forces in Anglophone social media immediately crowed that they had told us so, that this was just the latest proof of what we should have seen all along.

The editorial is feeble. It runs together three stock figures of the Muslim minority in France, and treats them all as symptoms of one and the same social problem. These are, to wit, the nominally Muslim teenagers who are radicalised and coaxed into blowing themselves up; the pious Muslim man who seeks to integrate into French society economically while remaining, in his soul and on his knees, oriented toward Mecca; and, finally, the subjugated Muslim woman forced by her patriarchal community to wear a veil.

Each of these figures, obviously, deserves independent consideration, and it is only the crudest straw-man fantasy about some monolithic Islam that would run them together.

The teenagers, for one thing, probably could have been drawn into a different sort of death cult that told them a different sort of fairy tale, if they had been born in a different time and place. The anxiety about losing the freedom to select pork products at the local sandwicherie, in turn, is an expression of a distinctly French parochialism, and one that in many of its expressions is positively adored by the Anglo-American left. All our effusion over the French perfection of the good life through slow and artisanal food, through rejection of GMOs, fails to grasp that the value placed on these things in French culture is the expression of a world-view that is always a hair’s breadth away from chauvinism. It says: our way of life is the best in the world, it grows right up out of the soil; don’t tread on us. It is only when this traditionalism bumps up against the traditionalism of halal dietary customs that it makes us uncomfortable.

I have no patience for either of these. The ethnic cuisine of my people comes pre-packaged and microwave-ready, and I find this freedom from concerns about terroir and authenticity in my eating habits well-suited to my cosmopolitan politics. I do think ham should be outlawed in France and everywhere else, but out of respect for the creature it comes from, not fear of it. The fact that the never-ending hecatomb of meat production can come up as a tangential issue in the course of discussing another, supposedly more serious issue might serve as a reminder of how much of our political life is really just a matter of picking and choosing.

But I don’t really want to discuss the argument of the editorial itself. I want to try to make sense, one more time, of the cultural role of Charlie Hebdo, and of what the Anglo commentariat might be missing about it. A first point, one that should be obvious, is that most of the luminaries among the magazine’s contributors are dead now, so we can't really talk about a continuity of identity between the operation to which the assassinations were a response, and what Charlie Hebdo is coming up with now. This editorial seems to reflect most of all the spirit of Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier), rather than the other victims of January 7. Charb was in his forties, and was not one of the senior cohort, such as Cabu and Wolinski, whose outlook was forged in the 1960s and whose principal preoccupation seems to have been the corruption of the French power elite, the cravenness of the Catholic church, the horrible spectre of the rise of the National Front.

Charb was significantly less committed to satire as a mode of engagement with the world than the others, and wanted to offer straightforward arguments, often about what he saw as the threats arising from mass Muslim migration to Europe. Quite apart from any consideration of his politics, Charb’s approach was never what Charlie Hebdo did best. As a cartoon by Luz of September 2015 didactically explains, satire is not only a way of making critical points about society or politics, as one might do in an Op-Ed piece; it is its own discursive mode, in which different rules and different standards of evaluation apply. I think Charlie Hebdo is at its best when it remains in this mode.

A second point has to do with the role of laïcité in French society. I was struck recently watching the Soviet silent-film director Dziga Vertov's 1934 Three Songs for Lenin for what it reveals about the longer history of 'the question of the veil'. The first 'song' features, just a few minutes in, the bold intertitle, 'My face was in a dark prison', followed by a sequence of images meant to show that the arrival of Marxist-Leninism would free the people of Muslim Central Asia from their backward and superstitious ways. Now you might suppose that this is just a strong-armed Stalin-era perversion of the nominal ideology of the Soviet Union, but in fact we find substantially the same view in Marx himself, as in an 1851 newspaper article in which he argues that the introduction of industrial weaving by the British in Bengal is the best thing that ever happened there, as it broke up the traditional village economies that were also the foundation of patriarchal despotism.

This presumption remains a real factor in much of the thinking of the Arab and European left on questions of culture and the limits of toleration. Something close to it is what guides Hafid Melhay, the owner of Libre Ère, the finest bookstore in Ménilmontant. Hafid is originally from Tunisia, and his shop specializes in Palestinian poetry, histories of the 20th-century non-aligned movement, scripts for plays like Kwame N'goran's Rosa Luxemburg. His humble shop, dare I say, has rather more useful resources for making sense of the present situation than the Librairie Essalam a few doors down from it on the Boulevard de Belleville, an Islamic bookstore featuring in its window French translations of the infamous Harun Yahya's screed against the theory of evolution, and some self-help manuals with tips on how to become happier through a deepening of piety. Back at Libre Ère, Hafid volunteers his services as a scribe and translator for recent immigrants from the Arabic-speaking world, and keeps posted in the store's entryway, inserted among so many classic works of socialist theory, of Arab and African nationalism, of postcolonial criticism, a classic Charlie Hebdo cover. If you're a North African socialist in Ménilmontant this combination of cultural products makes quite a bit more sense than if you are an American social-media activist desperate, above all, to be seen as taking the right side on the issue of the day, which means above all refusing to acknowledge that some questions have complicated histories and there might be no right side to take.

One of the things organised religions excel at is the control and subordination of women. This is, as American academics like to say, 'problematic', and in a way that we are all perfectly prepared to acknowledge when it comes, for example, to the restriction of abortion rights in the United States by the Christian right. Addressing this problem, when it is manifested in minority communities such as the Muslim population of France, can exacerbate their persecution and strengthen the hand of reactionary forces like the party of Marine Le Pen. But the distastefulness of this consequence does not make religious patriarchalism go away. As far as I can tell, the claim of most of the contributors to Charlie Hebdo, to be defenders of secularism who do not have a particular hostility to Islam, is, by their own lights, sincere. This sincerity may involve a failure to recognise the ways in which they are abetting the far right in France, but it may also be rooted in a sharper attunement to the concerns and challenges of people such as those who frequent Libre Ère. They are keeping alive a real, significant strand of the genetic legacy of the left, one which can only be cut out with significant reconceptualisation of what the left's core desiderata are. 

Social-media activists of the Anglophone soi-disant left have discarded the element of their political legacy that equated progress and liberation with the throwing off of the shackles of tradition, and have adopted as an article of faith the view that each community has its own internal standards by which alone it can be judged. Many of my acquaintances on the Anglophone left like to pretend to be neo-Bolsheviks, and often display that striking propaganda poster from the golden age of Soviet graphic design that says "A woman is also a person." But they are picking and choosing too. The refusal to acknowledge as oppressive anything that is done in the name of Islam is in real contradiction with certain other commitments they have, such as economic parity and full legal equality between men and women. Acknowledging this contradiction is not in itself a failure, and it need in no way be an incitement to persecution of marginalised minority groups. The only real failure is pretending things are simpler than they are. To do so is certainly much more likely to abet those politicians, such as Le Pen or Trump, whose success relies on simplistic formulae. And it is also to betray those countless millions of people from the Muslim world who are themselves wary of the claims of tradition, and of the forms of oppression that are so often excused in its name.

I do not believe the state has any business banning articles of clothing. This flows from a more general commitment to the principle that the state has no business intervening in cultural matters at all, whether culture is conceptualised in terms of 'religion' or not. For one thing, to allow the state to do this sort of thing sets government officials up as ethnographers, art critics, and other sub-species of hermeneuticist. I can't help but notice when in the Balkans that there are many Christian women with their heads covered as well. This is supposed to be an expression of 'culture', and not religion, but in the end, if pressed for explanation, somewhere down the line God is going to come up as the ground and rationale of the prohibition on exposed hair. Yet no Bulgarian grandmother would be told by any conceivable future French state that she must remove her head scarf in order to visit this secular country. I don't know what counts as religion, in other words, and I am a relatively subtle interpreter of culture, so I don't really see how a state bureaucracy could know.

Patriarchy can be perpetuated through women's headgear, in the Christian Balkans as in Muslim Anatolia or the Maghreb, even if not all women's religious attire is experienced by its wearers as oppressive. There is a real danger, if the state sets itself up to fight patriarchy by intervening in matters of attire, that this will only in fact create a further pressure, a new possibility for oppression, of the most marginalised and least powerful members of society. So we are left with a true dilemma.

I prefer to take the horn of it, as of many dilemmas in politics, that minimises state encroachment on individual freedom, as well as on the self-determination of sub-state communities. But in this I see myself as decisively breaking with anything that deserves to be called 'the left', in favour of something much closer to anarchism. Yet I am inclined to see the position of Charlie Hebdo, with which I disagree, as representing, again, a sincere and legitimate stance on a real social problem. This is the stance of the traditional left, and it cannot be reduced to simple Islamophobia, any more than Marx's argument for the assimilation of Jews into German society, and thus willy-nilly the eradication of Judaism, can be conflated with Hitlerism. Of course these are different stances. The new, social-media-based Anglophone left, to the extent that it dismisses French secularism as xenophobia tout court, is simply neglecting a significant part of its own legacy, and is misunderstanding much of what is at stake in the current French debate. 

Vampirology

I wrote a mass-market book about vampires (it beats doing overload teaching or private tutoring sessions). The publishers permitted me to retain my own voice and to explore ideas at a level that made the experience, over all, very enjoyable for me. Here's an excerpt. Publication information forthcoming. 

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As we consider the history of the vampire, there is an important overlap, indeed a cross-pollination, between literary imaginings on the one hand, and on the other, ostensibly factual works written from the perspective of medicine, law, or clerical demonology.

The roots of non-fictional writing on strange incidents and curiosities stretch back to antiquity, but it is in the wake of the scientific revolution that a more systematic approach develops to the collection of eyewitness reports. The famous journal of the Royal Society of London, The Philosophical Transactions, founded in 1666, is meant to be a forum for presenting cutting-edge scientific research in barometry or mechanics, but many of its pages are also taken up with testimonies from far-flung travellers and country doctors telling of what they saw when they went to investigate rumours of two-headed calves, talking dogs, or hauntings.

Early treatments of vampires are written in a tone that closely echoes the learned gentlemen of the Royal Society. The first extant treatise on vampirism (to our knowledge never translated) is De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis (On the Chewing of the Dead in their Tombs) by the German Lutheran pastor and historian Michaël Ranfft. Written in 1725, Ranfft observed that the phenomenon in question “will of course be revered by the faith of the Roman Catholics as some sort of divine miracle,” but maintained for his part that it will best be explained, along more enlightened and scientific lines, by appeal to “a certain influx in the bodies.” Here Ranfft exemplifies an approach that will be standard throughout the history of vampirological writing: an affected tone of doubt and distance from the subject matter, a strong denunciation of superstition (though this comes just as often from Catholic as from anti-Catholic authors), but always leaving open to the reader the titillating possibility that the author is himself wrong, or not completely forthcoming about his own views.

Ranfft helped to make vampires known throughout the German-speaking world by republishing and discussing a report from a minor administrator in the Serbian provinces of the Kingdom of Hungary, who described some peculiar events in the village of Kisolova following the death of a certain Petar Blagojević, of whom “it was stated that within eight days [of his death] nine people, both old and young, died after enduring an illness of twenty-four hours.” It is reported that “as they still lay alive on their death beds… the above-mentioned Plogojovitz [sic], who had died ten weeks prior, came to them in their sleep, lay down on top of them, and croaked that they must now give up their souls.” Blagojević’s widow, too, reported that her husband had returned to “ask for his oppanki or shoes,” but after this left the village to appear in another.

The author of the report cited by Ranfft goes on to use the word ‘vampire’ in one of its earliest printed occurrences, noting that “since among similar people (as are called Vampyri) there must be visible various signs, as that their bodies are undecayed, with skin, hair, beard, and nails growing,” the villagers resolved to open up the grave of Petar Blagojević and to see what they might discover there. Here is what they found:

That, first of all, the body and its grave were not in the least touched by the usual smell of the dead. The body, other than the nose, which had somewhat fallen off, was very fresh; the hair and the beard, and also the nails, of which the older ones had fallen away, had grown on him; the old skin, which was somewhat white, had peeled away, and a new fresh skin had come forth underneath; the face, hands and feet, and the whole body were so composed that they could not have been more perfect during the course of his life. Not without surprise I glimpsed fresh blood in his mouth, which, according to the common expression, he had sucked from those he had killed. In sum all the indices that people of this sort (as already mentioned above) should have on them were present.

At issue in part, was a puzzlement about some unexpected contingencies in the way in which bodies decompose (it was only in the 16th century that anatomical studies of cadavers became socially accepted, and many of them were procured by common grave robbery). While they often simply rot depending on the circumstances of the air, the temperature, and the accessibility of the space to microorganisms, bodies can also come to appear, under the right conditions, even more healthy than than they had been just prior to death. Sometimes a corpse is found with blood streaming from the mouth, a natural consequence of the internal beakdown of the organs, which nonetheless can easily be mistaken for a vestige of recent feasting. They frequently become bloated, and in an era in which corpulence was still strongly associated with health, this temporary condition could easily appear as an improvement that could only be explained by assuming that the corpse had been ingesting food—food, that is, or something like it.

Another broad social change that precipitates the 18th-century fascination with graves and their inhabitants, is a growing awareness of the history of burial and the variety of methods by which human beings have disposed of dead bodies. Already in 1658 the English author Sir Thomas Browne publishes the Hydriotaphia, a strange and meandering treatise on the occasion of the discovery of Roman burial urns near Norfolk. The work expands into a broad-scoped reflection on burial practices and rituals surrounding death throughout the world. Browne remarks that “[m]any have taken voluminous pains to determine the state of the soul upon disunion; but men have been most phantasticall in the singular contrivances of their corporall dissolution.” The most sober nations, he continues, “have rested in two ways, of simple inhumation and burning.” Europe, since the end of antiquity preferred interment. The increased exposure to other funeary rituals, through encounters with non-European cultures and by an increasingly systematic archaeology of the European past, lead Europeans to reflect on what, in fact, the best methods of ‘corporall dissolution’ might be. In the Balkans, cremation was still an exceptional measure in the early 18th century. Yet we might still see Blagojević’s fate, burnt ‘down to ashes’ to make sure that he can never return, as part of a broader exploration and questioning of traditional funerary practices.

Many of the conventions deployed by Ranfft reappeared throughout the 18th century in medical treatises not centrally concerned with vampires, but rather focused from a clinical point of view, on the difficulty of determining the precise boundary between life and death. The most interesting example of such a work is the Danish-French physician Jacques-Bénigne Winslow’s 1742 Dissertation on the Uncertainty of the Signs of Death, and the Misuse of Burials, and Rushed Embalmings. Winslow cites many authorities to establish the view that “putrefaction is the only infallible sign of death.” Like Thomas Browne, he goes into great depth investigating the “funeral solemnities” of various nations, attempting to establish from a comparative perspective, that human beings across the world developed practices to avoid premature burial of the living. Winslow also peppers his treatise with macabre reports, many of which read like Gothic fiction. Thus we learn of a lady of Auxbourg, who, “falling into a Syncope, in Consequence of a Suffocation of the Matrix, was buried in a deep Vault, without being covered with Earth… Some Years after, however, one of the same Family happening to die, the Vault was open’d, and the Body of the young Lady found on the Stairs at its Entry, without any Fingers on the Right Hand.”

Another very important work, particularly for its role in establishing the geographical domain in which vampirism is thought to occur, is the French Dominican Augustin Calmet’s 1751 Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits, and on Vampires, or the Revenants of Hungary, Moravia, etc. Calmet declares he has “always been most struck by what is related of vampires or the revenants from Hungary, Moravia, Poland, the brucolacs of Greece, those who have been excommunicated, who, they say, never decay.” As a priest, Calmet is intent on establishing the reality of the phenomena he describes, in order to characterize it as a true instance of diabolism and to warn his readers of its danger. Thus, in a chapter entitled ‘Are Vampires or Revenants Truly Dead?’, the author appeals to the wisdom of crowds. He insists it is impossible “that all at once several people begin to believe they are seeing what does not exist at all, and that they die so quickly after from a sickness that is purely imagined.” Father Calmet, like Browne and Winslow, is interested in a sober perspective to balance the supernatural, to trace the strange phenomena back to plausible medical pathologies or environmental conditions. Thus he explains:

Those who have died of the plague, from poison, from rabies, from drunkenness, and from epidemic are more subject to returning as undead, apparently because their blood coagulates more difficultly, and sometimes those who are not yet dead are buried, in view of the danger that there is in leaving them for long outside of the sepulchre, for fear of the infection that they cause… These Vampires are only known in certain countries, like Hungary, Moravia, Silesia, where these illnesses are more common.

One might at this point wonder what Calmet really thinks. Is it diabolical forces at work? Or is it a question of epidemiology? As is typical of vampirologists, the author prefers to keep us suspended between the two registers of explanation, to maintain his reader’s attention by striking the perfect balance between sobriety and gullibility.

A convention emerges in vampirological works over the course of the 18th century, whereby the author is generally presented as an intrepid and dedicated, but perhaps somewhat shadowy character. This doubt is in turn offset by an assurance that the author is a man of the cloth, an abbey or a clergyman who has immersed himself in the study of dark forces in order to better combat them for the sake of humanity’s salvation. This is the persona adopted by Augustin Calmet, and it is one that will continue in fictional form into the era of cinema. Perhaps no author embodies this type more perfectly than the eccentric English Catholic deacon Montague Summers (1880-1948), author of multiple works on witchcraft, demonology, werewolves, and vampires. He consistently claimed, in a somewhat deadpan tone, to be committed to the reality of all these things, and to be fighting against them by the power of the pen. A foreword to the 1968 edition of his 1929 study, The Vampire in Europe, tells us that Summers made all his public appearances in clerical dress, and attempted to convince others that he was a Catholic priest, though it is far more likely that he was in fact an unfrocked parson. He was a vocal advocate for the public execution of witches—in the 20th century! The author of the foreword, a Catholic priest, conjectures that Summers’s stern admonitions against necromancy are at once an expression of his own guilt, or mixed feelings about having engaged in it himself. All this, of course, is meant to heighten the interest of the reader. Which side, one constantly wonders, is the author really on?

Whether writing as a science-oriented debunker, or as a pious fighter against the forces of darkness, or indeed as some mixture of these two, vampirologists always seem to be infected by their subject. Skeptics will see them as frivolous for wasting their intellectual energy on an old folk myth, and the pious will see them as rather too interested, for suspicious reasons, in the very thing they are supposed to be fighting against. It is hard to be taken seriously as a vampirologist.

...

One senses that as the vampire theme evolves and adapts, it often loses its connection to the exploration of desire and regret that is at the true essence of vampirism, the raison d’être of the vampire as a literary invention. Some ‘mere’ entertainments continue to explore the essential core of the vampire myth, even as they defer in varying degrees to contemporary sensibilities (the series True Blood is a good example here: it belongs to the present moment, but is also preoccupied with what has remained constant in vampire representations since at least the 19^th century). Yet many other appearances of the vampire seem to involve the mere outer form, the costume and the accoutrements without any concern for the inner life and struggle that have caused the vampire to appear the way he does. Often this decontextualizing occurs where the vampire plays a part in a strictly comedic or farcical scenario. More often (increasingly so over the course of the 20^th century), it occurs as a result of adaptation and appropriation, where vampires figure alongside other stock characters with whom they do not, so to speak, ‘naturally’ belong. We see examples of this art of incongruous combination going back at least as far as Gustave Le Rouge’s 1908 vampire story, Prisoner of the Planet Mars. This habit continues throughout the B-movie era, yet it seems to have mutated in recent years, as a result of the advent of the Internet and the new aesthetic sensibility centered around the ‘mash-up’: artwork that consists in the combination of elements we would not have expected to find together, facilitated by digital means.

Perhaps the most remarkable recent example of the mashed-up vampire, is the 2012 movie, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, from the Kazakh director Timur Bekmambetov and based on the 2010 novel of the same name by Seth Grahame-Smith. The basic plot conceit is what one might expect from the title: the president and Great Emancipator was, in his secret hours away from the demands of the Civil War, engaged in protracted battle with bloodsucking revenants. Why Abraham Lincoln, exactly? Because he, like Buffy or Van Helsing, represents the force of good against evil? Because he is a rough contemporary of Le Fanu and Baudelaire? Perhaps, but the real reason for bringing Lincoln into contact with the vampires seems to be incongruity itself: like Nietzsche Family Circus, Kim Kierkegaardashian, or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, our era loves to mix oil and water, to force together elements that on their own would always remain separate. The results are often hilarious, and yet, also, somewhat empty: why did we care in the first place? The answer does not necessarily make itself known.

Vampire stories seem to have a way not just of reflecting contemporary sensibilities and cultural transformations, but also of anticipating them. Pardon the glimmer of credulousness when I say this, but there is something astounding in the interwoven life and art of Sharon Tate, who starred in Roman Polanski’s 1967 film The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck, married the director, and two years later, while pregnant with Polanski’s child, was murdered by the Manson family in their helter-skelter spree. The Fearless Vampire Killers, as it is usually called for the sake of convenience, is a strange film. It is, as its full title suggests, meant to be a spoof, a rollicking send-up, a bit of fun. But it is far too dark to be fun. It is weighted with the historical legacy of serious European literature and folklore: a sort of churning-up and examination of the buried fantasies and memories that must have animated Polanski’s childhood imagination. Its color and light suggest something closer to avant-garde Soviet cinema, such as that of Sergei Paradjanov, than anything familiar from Hollywood. It is dank, cobwebby, perverse, and impossible to watch Tate’s Sarah Shagal, innocently taking a bath in a Transylvanian castle unaware of her fate, without thinking of the actress’s own fate beyond the confines of the story.

Polanski’s film was adapted for stage productions in Paris and other European cities, presented as a schlocky musical: a bit of fun, as we originally expected to believe the film to be, at least if we listened to the marketing division of MGM. But so it always is, with vampires. They flit back and forth, between our deepest darkest fantasies, and our need for a bit of fun and distraction. This is perhaps the most important reason for their tremendous adaptive success, and their near certain survival into the future, no matter what new degradations of our artistic values and sensibilities await us, no matter how stupid future marketers of popular entertainments will take us to be.

But, I suppose, here I am starting to sound like a decadent aesthete myself, unfit for this world and yearning for something that has been irrevocably lost. I have been writing all night, now, and I sense the first light piercing through my study’s window. Excuse me while I get up to shut the blinds.

The Cloaca of Work and Friendship

As Facebook increasingly becomes the site of work-related activity, alongside what's left in this degraded age of true amical interaction, I've come to think of it as a sort of cloaca, through which both the shit and the joyous stuff of life pass indiscriminately.

In an evolutionary sense the monotremes (the ‘one-holes’) are considered the most primitive of mammals, while those that have developed special organs for each function are held to be more advanced. We however have gone the other way. A generation ago one did not have to uphold one’s professional identity, one did not have to look busy, when shooting the breeze with friends late in the evening. Now, especially among academics, it is understood that we will carry over our career-minded uprightness, our eagerness to appear as good mentors, as positive role-models and eager organisers, into this same venue, practically the only venue that is left to many of us, in which we also pretend to express who we really are. But I am not a good mentor or role-model or organiser. I only do those things for a living. What I am, in reality, is a sceptical, hesitant, conflicted, confused human being, who nonetheless finds life worth living mostly because of the vast reserves of poetry, literature, art, and philosophy passed down to us from the ancestors. I am not my job, even if my job is the closest thing I could find in this degraded age, in this degraded world, to pure communion with the beautiful things that do not change. Or at least that is how I imagined the job would be, even if global economic pressures, craven administrators, and anti-intellectual politicians are doing everything they can to ensure that it not be that.

Academics often hold forth in social media on political issues, and this is thought to be a departure from their professional activity. But is it in fact? Much of the discussion serves to establish group solidarity, and it should be no big surprise that a group that bonds over political issues on Facebook is usually also united by education and profession. And in fact not just politics, but presentation of dimensions of the personal life as well is now part of the extended work we are doing on Facebook: the photographs of class-appropriate foods, the pronatalism, the characterisation of one’s intimate relationship as a ‘partnership’ (originally an expression of solidarity with same-sex couples who could not get married, but now mostly an inadvertent acknowledgement of the ubiquity of neoliberal forces: everything is a collaboration now, everything is work), and so on.

All of this is work-talk, and it happens at all hours of the day. If you do not experience it as work-talk, this is only thanks to the fortuitous natural fit between your personality, the economic order, and the tasks that have fallen to you within it: lucky for you, if the way you naturally talk is also the way you are expected to talk in order to maintain your professional identity and to keep the paychecks coming in. But for some the use of archaic terms comes more naturally, unapproved phrases, charged locutions. Where have these gone? In media history they burst through periodically: as in the flourishing of independent cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They seemed to be enjoying a new life in the first years of social media (or is it just that I was younger and more reckless?). But now there is again a perfect convergence, between the language of the media (social or not) and the language we are expected to channel in the relationships that ape friendship but that are grounded in economic necessity. There is no exploration in social media of new modes of expression, but only channeling of the established and expected modes, the modes appropriate to employees (or, more likely, candidates for employment), the same imitative sounding-like one might bring from an evening's TV viewing to the next morning's golf game with the well-connected uncle or beau père.

We conduct this work-talk in our underwear now, we do it on the toilet. And this is by now pretty much all we’re able to do here: talk about ‘how great my students are’, how pumped up we are about some upcoming conference, some jargon-filled funding application we just sent off, how great our partners are, how great our children are, how great some brand of whiskey or poutine au foie gras is, how dumb and evil Republicans are. Yes, they’re dumb and evil. Of course they’re dumb and evil! But affirming this self-evident truth is not what makes life beautiful. There is no history here, no art, literature, poetry, theatre, not even any science save for dumb memes about science.

It is as if there is some secret Zuckerbergian algorithm that has been gradually and subperceptibly narrowing our perception of the range of things appropriate for bringing up on our walls: electoral politics, family, food, TV, work. It seems we now have incontrovertible historical proof that every new medium of communication will be exactly as disappointing as the last. We have a potentially limitless forum to talk about whatever we like, we have historically unprecedented access to information and images from the entirety of human history, and we've ended up making this place as dull and as myopic, as presentist and empty, as a typical episode of the Today show circa 1986, to be talked about at the water cooler later that day between colleagues who in fact have nothing to talk about, mouthing some line half-retained from Bryant Gumbel, coming out of the same hole as the ’Sure thing, boss’ uttered a few minutes later when the supposed break is over. The difference, now, is that the water cooler has been installed in our homes, and the work never ends.

The Loss of the Circumflex

An official reform of French spelling was recently announced, causing no small uproar on the Internet, and presumably in real life too (I don't really talk to people), as to whether this is good or bad.

There were three broad sorts of change. The first are changes to the spelling of words in order to better reflect their pronunciation. The most common example cited has been the replacement of oignon by ognon. I confess I had always thought the first syllable of this word was supposed to be pronounced as in oie ('goose'), that is, roughly as in the first syllable of the English water. I noticed people around me were pronouncing it as ognon, but took this for a regionalism or a sort of laziness. I can't say I care so much about this change, but ognon looks awfully strange to me, too much like a variation on some proto-Slavic root for fire, as in the Russian огонь ('ogon''), whose genitive is огня ('ognya') and whose Sanskrit cousin is the goddess अग्नि (Agni): in all of which cases the g is pronounced before the n, rather than indicating a softening in the termination of the n and providing a faint iotation to the vowel that follows. I expect I will be practicing orthographic disobedience whenever I write that word in the future, not out of firm principle, but only out of soft preference.

The second sort of reform has mostly to do with hyphens, e.g., transforming that most French of words (at least since Godard), week-end, into weekend. This seems to follow a broad trend that is much further along in English (a hundred years ago it was common to see dog-house, out-fit, and so on), and I find I really could not care less. This all has more to do with typography than with historical linguistics. As Barrett Brown has established, there is a certain sort of semiliteracy that is signalled by gross overdependence on the hyphen, yet no one will be accused of not having fully learned to write for daring to do without it. Our prison correspondent doesn't mention the strange habit of treating an adverb that modifies an adjective as somehow part of the same hyphenated word as the adjective, e.g., quickly-accelerating, beautifully-dressed. To me this is worse than in-mate, or any of those ridiculous hyphenated words beloved of postmodernists who have grown tired of parentheses: thus a conference on (trans)portation might be rebranded as trans-portation, as we move from the 90s to the aughts to the teens, ever on the look-out for new ways to make familiar things 'problematic'.

But anyhow the third and final sort of change, and the one that concerns me most, has to do with the great reduction in the use of the circumflex accent, the elegant ^. One of this noble crown's common functions, which has been preserved in the post-reform era, is disambiguation, signalling that a word is not the same as one that would otherwise be identical to it, sans circonflexe. Thus du as the contraction of de and le can be distinguished from dû as the past participle of devoir, even if we often make do without the accent, and even if the accent plays no phonetic role and has no real historical sense.

Another more significant role for the circumflex, a role that has been greatly reduced by the reform, is to mark the historical disappearance of a consonant, typically an s, that had been inherited from Latin. Thus magister becomes maistre, and then, soon enough, maître. The circumflex accent does not signal that you should pronounce the word any differently, but then again neither did the s in maistre. It had long been silent, a vestige of a sound from an ancestor language. The circumflex simply marks a further degeneration of this unused part, like the almost undetectable pelvis still shuttled around by the enormous right whale, who has not had any need to bend at the waist since he took to the ocean so long ago. The current shift to maitre not only makes the ancestral connection to magister that much harder to discern, it also hides from view the meaning of more orthographically conservative proper names, like Joseph de Maistre. There are countless examples of the way the circumflex serves as a bridge to the past in French: hôte reminds us of the strange autoantonymy latent in the ideas of both host and hostility. Tête preserves a crucial link to testa, and pâte to pasta: that strange word that gives us in English both spaghetti and the stuff we brush our teeth with. Luckily these instances of the circumflex will be preserved, for now. But how much longer before some bureaucrat announces they too serve no real use?

If you think language is in its essence a facilitator of maximally clear and streamlined communication between living people, then this reform constitutes real progress. But if you think as I do that language is a monument and a link to the ancestors, if you were already more comfortable talking to the dead than to the living, then it is a loss: not a great loss, but a small slipping away of something that once mattered.

Matt Bieber's Life in the Loop: Essays on OCD

I tend towards a fairly hardcore social constructionism about most mental-health diagnoses. I've read Michel Foucault and Ian Hacking, and I'm well aware of the historicity of ways of classifying and enacting whatever it is that's eating at our souls. World War I ends and young men stop fuguing; no one has come down with an attack of St. Vitus' Dance for some centuries now. These days PTSD is in fashion, the proximate causes of which range from surviving heavy combat in Iraq to having to read Ovid's Metamorphoses in a humanities survey course.

I'm not saying we aren't all feeling something, that we don't all have a current running through us that at one minute charges us up with the life force only to send us convulsing to the ground with its cruel and insupportable shocks the next. I'm saying that how we describe this current has much more to do with the way the people around us are chattering than with the way our own private neurons are firing. 

Except when it comes to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This, I maintain, is a real illness, like diabetes. I know because I suffered from it for a few years in my early twenties, and the experience of it remains one of the most basic autobiographical facts in my repertoire, the talking-point I pull out most readily when it comes to the difficult matter of who I am and what my whole thing is.

When I was an undergraduate I was so obsessed with getting perfect grades that I developed a web of elaborate rituals designed to absorb the letter 'A', and to cast out the letter 'B' (and to a lesser extent 'C', 'D', and 'F', which seemed less threatening because they were so far from any real possible outcome of my academic work). So I would swallow whenever I read an 'A' on a page, and I would make a sort of retching noise whenever I came across a 'B'. When I wanted to stop reading a book, I had to stop at the first line on the top right hand page that had, as its final grade-relevant letter, an 'A'. I had to quickly close the book at that point, to ensure that I did not see any lower grade-letters after finishing the 'safe' line.

I would similarly swallow and reject letters on street signs as I was driving down the road; if I accidentally passed a sign on the highway on which the last letter I saw was a 'B' rather than an 'A', I would be required to get off at the next off-ramp, go back two on-ramps in the reverse direction, and pass the problematic sign again in order to get a glimpse of an 'A'. The announcement of upcoming avenues was always a breeze, while boulevards were tricky, and their abbreviation as 'blvd.' enough to trigger a full-blown crisis. 

When I spoke, too, and had to use the bad letters, I had a whole mantra, a sort of prayer, that I would mumble under my breath after nearly every sentence, which contained only 'A's and helped to counteract the negative charge of the other letters. (If you must know, the precise sentence was: That's not great, lovely man. I have no idea what it meant, or how I landed on it. Its interest to me was entirely phonetic, containing as it did just the right combination of linguo-dentals, nasals, plosives, and glorious open-throated 'A's, to lift the miasma.)

I also could not handle odd numbers. There was a sort of innate metaphysics to this: I wanted everything, everywhere in the cosmos, to be paired off with another thing. Sometimes, when faced with a lone object, such as a piece of chalk, I would break it in two, so that the two could be friends, or perhaps lovers. If I walked past a bush, and brushed the side of it once, I would have to return to brush it again, so that the first brushing could have its eternal partner in the second brushing. 

I am not exaggerating when I say that these rituals consumed my whole life. I spent these years without friends. Who could have friends under such circumstances? My chalk and my brushings all had friends, thanks to my solicitude, but I was deeply alone.

I do not mean to boast when I say that this disorder, however apparently rooted in dumb superstition, afflicts the intelligent at far greater rates than the dim. This has long been my prejudice, anyway, but it was powerfully confirmed in my recent reading of Matt Bieber's In the Loop: Essays on OCD. These days, the only lingering symptom of my own OCD is that I am unable to say 'no' whenever I'm asked to write something. I'll write the very worst letters with abandon, too. I'll write strings of F's if I feel like it, and swallow them up. I'm cured. Or, rather, I'm no longer showing symptoms of obsessive compulsiveness, but only symptoms of severe graphomania, which is probably an evolved stage of the same old illness. Anyhow, on occasions like the present one I'm grateful for this relatively mild form of enslavement. 

People with OCD are smart, as I've said, but for the most part they keep silent about it, because it's embarrassing as hell: the gaping abyss between our conscious beliefs (enlightened, scientific) and the things we find our bodies doing, between our goal-directed and hyper-efficient management of our time and the gross inconvenience of the rituals; the unshareable privacy of it all; the ridiculous side-effects of the tricyclics. 

So we ordinarily just keep quiet, and direct our intelligence elsewhere. But this is not what Bieber has done, and I for one am extremely grateful to him for this. His is a revealing, honest, humorous, and moving account of what it is like, what it is really like, to be an obsessive compulsive. 

I'm not going to join some support group or in any way seek to reify this dumb quirk any more than I already have here --and I was joking about the diabetes comparison; I don't have a fucking clue what the ontological status of OCD is, I only know that the medication didn't help nearly as much as just getting older and growing out of it did--, but the sense of solidarity that Bieber's essays instills in me is really something quite remarkable, and reminds me again, as the best writing about bad things can do, that what's bad is human too, and whatever is human is not so bad. 

Cross-posted with 3 Quarks Daily.

Post-Scripta:

I think I graduated with a 4.13 grade-point average. I got 102% in my advanced logic course, and a letter of recommendation from its instructor saying that this was the highest grade of any student ever to take that course with him. This is how I went from being a high-school dropout in 1990 to getting into a fairly selective graduate program a few years later. Whatever I have managed to accomplish, I owe to this illness, and I think this is why it occupies such a large space in my attempts at self-narration. 

I still can't stand the letter 'D', and sometimes find myself muttering countervalent words in order to remove its taint from my mouth. Honestly, what a horrible letter. 

Why Rachel Dolezal Still Matters After Charleston

In the first days following the news of Rachel Dolezal’s ruse, there appeared to be some real hope emerging that, at long last, the deadlock of identitarian politics might finally be over. Compelling voices spoke up to acknowledge the simple truth, that identitarianism is essentialism, no matter how much its defenders will ornament their essentialism with the acknowledgment that race is, in the end, a social construction. No one said it more compellingly than Adolph Reed, Jr., who seemed almost poised to become the progressive voice of the new political moment: one that pays attention to serious things. 

But then, yesterday, yet another racist attack by a homegrown terrorist took place, and even before the crime scene had been cleaned up we Americans were being scolded for having considered the possibility, for a moment, that racial categorisation (and the essentialism that flows from the practice) is something we might hope to move beyond. Right away, people were being referred to, in the identitarian manner, as ‘bodies’ instead of as people. And the fact of ‘being a black body’ was reinscribed back into the natural order of things. As Jelani Cobb wrote in The New Yorker, closing off the Dolezal affair, "The existential question of who is black has been answered in the most concussive way possible: the nine men and women slain as they prayed last night at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, were black."

But the existential question needs to be asked again and again, and the belief that there is a simple answer to it is part of the reason America cannot overcome its murderous pathology, cannot really end the Civil War. Rachel Dolezal grew up in a society that told her, constantly: "You're white, you're white, you're white," and she seems to have thought to herself, "Really, now, can it be so simple as that?" Dylann Roof heard the same refrain, and said, "Why yes I am!" It worked its way into his brain like a worm. I’ll take Dolezal's response to the myth of whiteness over Roof's any day, as we all should, and I refuse to feel bad about the supposed frivolity of the possibilities Dolezal's life seemed, for a moment, to open up. Since when is there a moral duty to remain faithful to the accidents of your birth, and to accurately report your vital-statistical information to the whole world? I'm with Dolezal: I don't give two shits what my ancestors say about who I ‘really’ am (unless it happens to agree with me, which in my case it mostly does). I'm not interested in whether there's a pathology behind it in her case. We all have the right to reinvent ourselves. That's freedom, and it should be spread more broadly still, not condemned and pathologized and restricted. 

I recently clicked on a link that brought me to the blog of a young Canadian identitarian. On her ‘about’ page she noted that she lived on unceded First Nations territory and was thus a settler colonialist; that she was white but of a low-income background; and that she had some ancestry from Southern and Eastern Europe that in the recent past would have marked her out in North American society as a target of discrimination. Now where have I seen this before? I thought. Who else spells out their ancestry in their very first presentation of self? Oh I remember: it was in the personal ads on the Stormfront website! (I have an anthropologist colleague here in Paris who introduced me to this dark world, and who is working, in a broadly Foucauldian vein, on American white supremacists; he thinks all Americans are bonkers when it comes to race, and likes to cite a TV show he saw during his fieldwork that featured Snoop Dogg trying to guess, from a panel of candidates, who was genetically the most African.) The white supremacists state these supposedly self-defining ‘facts’ as points of pride, rather than as a sort of helpful identification key for others to place you on the privilege map, but the implicit theory of selfhood is the same. Dylann Roof shares with the young identitarians, purportedly of the left, the same fantasies about how it is we come to be who we are. I am with Reed and Foucault and Dolezal: a motley group of course, but all at least united in their rejection of essentialism.

Again, don’t take this as an expression of fixation on what was ultimately a frivolous media spectacle. I mean it: until Americans overcome their essentialism about race, their inscription of the Black-white divide into the basic ontology of the world, Charleston is going to keep on happening. It is in the interest of white supremacy that this divide be maintained, and the left, for as long as it continues in its identitarian errancy, is being duped into helping to maintain it. 

Charlie Hebdo and Literature

"Jesting destroys dignity, removes honour [yudhhibu bi-mā' al-wajh], breeds hatred, spoils the sweetness of belief and love [yudhhibu bi-halāwat al-īmān wa-l-wudd], tarnishes the learning of a religious expert [faqīh], emboldens the ignorant, deadens the heart, alienates from God, and spawns silliness and humiliation." --Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ibshīhī (d. 850/1446-47).

"[Ibn Sa'dān] once said: come let us make this night of ours one of mujūn [libertinism, obscenity] and indulge in much jest [na'khudhu min al-hazli binasibin wāfir] for seriousness has tired us, beaten our energies with sadness. Give us what you have." --Al-Tawhīdī (c. 318-414/930-1023)

*

In response to the recent attempt by some members of PEN to betray persecuted editorialists throughout the world by refusing to honor the survivors of a right-wing death squad's attack on a group of caricature artists in Paris a few months ago, Harper's has taken my April essay out from behind its paywall. Many have been writing on the Internet about their exasperation with all the 'think pieces' on this topic. When will we have finally had enough? they wonder. My answer is that there will be no more need for 'think pieces' when there will be sufficiently serious thinking about this question. What the PEN protesters have given us is a refusal-to-think piece: Twitter-worthy, infantile, presentist American identitarianism that both denies commonalities of experience and history when they are present (as between Europe and the Arab world), and presumes such commonalities when they are in fact absent (as between Anglo-American and French traditions of humor and satire), all on the basis of the ungrounded extension of the currently preferred American analytic lens of 'whiteness' and 'non-whiteness'. This lens certainly reveals quite a bit about American history and its enduring legacies, but very little about the broader history of the Mediterranean and its peoples, against the background of which the recent Charlie Hebdo incident is best understood.  

I have been defending Charlie Hebdo, not only on the basis of a commitment to freedom of expression, but also out of an appreciation for what is expressed. Obviously I can't command others to agree with me here, to have a taste for something they simply don't like. I also can't command you to like Lolita, for example. But if all of a sudden I find myself surrounded by people saying that they refuse to approve of, or even to take a look at, a book that condones child rape, I'll be right to judge that this isn't really a question of aesthetic taste or critical judgment in literature; it's a question of political forces, at work perhaps beyond the awareness of the individual reader, that are determining what is to legitimately count as a work of literature.

Honestly, people who have signed the PEN letter are openly admitting that they have never even looked at Charlie Hebdo, and even that they would not be in a position to understand the French if they were to look it. I can accept that your overall judgment of it might, after thorough consideration, be negative (just like you might not like Lolita, Gargantua, Monty Python...), but that is just patently not what is happening here. As I've written elsewhere, it seems to me that Charlie Hebdo has been Justine Sacco'd in the Anglosphere: summarily judged, and then subject to a campaign of ruthless denunciation. Except that Charlie Hebdo is not a Tweet, but a decades-long collaborative endeavor, and those of us in the part of the world that is still capable of interpreting texts and images in a nuanced way are left scratching our heads when we see the unreflective, summary judgment passed on such a complicated body of work --often misfiring, but often unquestionably courageous and unquestionably funny-- as if it were some dumb Tweet or other source of ephemeral online outrage.

I have also maintained elsewhere that the judgment of taste that we so often hear, invoking Charlie Hebdo's vulgarity or childishness, is a sure indication of what is really going on: it is classic Anglo-American arrogant prudishness, mistaking itself for solidarity with the oppressed.The idée fixe among Anglophone would-be progressives has been that Charlie Hebdo is 'crude', 'childish', 'vulgar', or, as Eliot Weinberger curiously put it in the LRB, that it specializes in 'frat-boy humor'. As if France had 'frat boys', and as if jokes about the body and its orifices and noises, and about the delirious variety of human grotesquerie, weren't also the humor of Cervantes and Rabelais. I did not want to get dragged back into the mêlée this time around, but I'm reading Don Quixote right now in Edith Grossman's lovely new translation, and I'm struck by just how much this particular sensibility matters to me, and how much it's worth fighting for in a world that doesn't get it and is afraid of it.

In the Harper's piece what I was trying to do was to insist on a revision of the facile view that what Charlie Hebdo represented was something distinctly and exclusively 'Western', 'Enlightenment-based', etc. Hence my attempt, space permitting, at a sort of genealogy of the joke and of the sources of bawdy literature --of which I see Charlie Hebdo as a descendant-- in pan-Mediterranean oral folklore. I detect here a possibility for going back around all the apparent dichotomies that both French laïcité defenders such as Alain Finkielkraut as well as the American left thinkers who have taken such a firm stance on Charlie Hebdo have helped to perpetuate, and finding a shared history and a common reality.

To put this a bit differently, Rabelais is closer to an anonymous medieval Arab raconteur than he is to, say, Peter Carey. You can classify Charlie Hebdo as a product of the wit-shrouded racism and imperialism of the Enlightenment, assimilating it to Voltaire and so on, but there is an alternative genealogy, which I have been trying to draw out, which connects the modern European satirical tradition to something much larger than Europe, and to something much older than modernity. It is my opponents, and not me, who are perpetuating the ideology of European exceptionalism by acting as though satire has no roots, and can have no purchase, outside of Europe.*

The reason for bringing up Kant and Descartes was not to cow opponents by argument ad auctoritatem, but rather to show that it is not in some supposed superiority of European rationality, as expressed in the European philosophical tradition, that we're going to find an answer to why Europeans supposedly 'get the joke' and why non-Europeans supposedly do not. European philosophy is embarrassed by humor, distances itself from it, and when Kant tries clumsily to engage with it, he shows how unprepared the philosophical tradition is to do so in a rigorous way. So my point was to say that the invocation of 'I think therefore I am' at the Paris rallies after the attacks was misplaced; and that if we want to make sense of Charlie Hebdo's humor, we have to look to a very different domain of culture than philosophy, the one that, again, reaches back genealogically to Rabelais et al. and from there across the Mediterranean to a part of the world Europeans wrongly imagine as the total opposite and negation of their historical experience. But I had to talk about philosophy in order to show why it wasn't delivering the tools to get us out of this apparent impasse.

I am not a big fan of most laïcité rhetoric, and I am sensitive to how it is used for purposes of exclusion. (I am also not listening to what Salman Rushdie is saying on this topic.) This is why I've tried to be consistent about coupling my position on Charlie Hebdo with an equally insistent position on, e.g., the rights and dignity of regular and non-regular ('illegal') migrants to France. I see my position as the one that, more than that of those with whom I disagree, is most insistent that Islam must not be perceived as a monolith, that in fact there is no such thing as the Muslim community, but rather numerous disagreeing factions, by no means all of which agree with the attackers that there is something unacceptably offensive about the content of Charlie Hebdo. Anyhow I do find that the more I defend my own view, the more I detect a certain sclerosis in it, and I'm scared of that too, which is why I've been trying to move on to other things, to come back to this later and see if my view has changed. For now, it hasn't.

--

*If you would like an introduction to some Arabic texts that make Charlie Hebdo's 'frat boy' humor look like pious scriptural commentary, I recommend starting with Zoltan Szombathy's Mujun: Libertinism in Medieval Muslim Society and Literature (2013).

For more on the transmission of literary styles and genres, including 'vulgar' ones, see J. A. Abu Haidar, Hispano-Arabic Literature and the Early Provençal Lyric (2001).

Finally, I've learned a great deal from all the articles in The Rude, The Bad, And The Bawdy: Essays in Honour of Geert Jan Van Gelder. Edited By Adam Talib, Marlé Hammond, and Arie Schippers. Cambridge: Gibb Memorial Trust (2014). Of particular note in this rich volume is Denis McAuley's "Two Fart Jokes in Ibn 'Arabī's Muhādarat Al-Abrār" (198-207).       

Why Did Begin Besiege Beirut?

Rarely have I seen a cityscape more depressing than that part of Beirut we are expected to call its centre-ville. It once contained a real souk, a vital, organic city center. But this was flattened in the various wars, with Syria and Israel, over the past several decades, and was replaced by a ghost town of Fendi and Armani, the vapid aesthetic of a giant duty free shop, free of all duty to the past and to community. There is almost no one around but the security guards behind cement blocks, with their metal-detectors and their florescent vests. The main corridor of the souk has all the joy of a Daniel Libeskind monument. There are some mosques, too, equally well protected, and I sense I would be roughly as out of place inside as I would be at the Armani or Dior shop. 

So I make my way back to Hamra Street, for now the real center of cosmopolitan Beirut, with thin men in berets who roll cigarettes and sit at cafés, with shop signs in a proud vestigial French-- not the kind that speaks of oppressive colonial structures, but the kind that testifies to a forgotten hope for a true cosmopolis. The proper names are transliterated à la française --Chaussures Fouad, Vêtements Ayoub-- and that is already enough, for me, to read them as belonging to a venerable lost era (there was an Ayoob's hardware store in my hometown in California, but that conjured very different sentiments). When was this era? It was Ottoman, perhaps, but the Turks left the Levantine upper and middle classes to choose, from under their political domination, whatever cultural orientation they chose.

Why France? There are plenty of Lebanese blondes, immortalized and lampooned in fiction and popular culture. There are also plenty of hair salons advertising various techniques of blondification. But somewhere between the dissimulation of the color-treatment of hair and the pure genetic expression of Nordic traits, there is the historical fact of the Crusades, and it does not take long here to hear some variation on the claim that all this the blondness comes from the Franks.  

The Frankish women march in and out of the Fendi shop, carrying bags, past the black-haired Saracen guards. 

I was taken to a restaurant-bar on Hamra Street my first evening in this city and was reminded of a recent news item I had seen, on the growing problem of distinguishing between Islamist and hipster beards in this city of heterogeneous communities. Both Hezbollah as well as the clean-shaven Lebanese security forces want long, non-religious beards banned, and they periodically harass and attack the young men who wear them not because scripture requires it, but out of devotion only to global fashion. In the bar I was struck by how fine the difference is between these two primary significations of the beard in the contemporary world, but since the men who wore them were also holding drinks I knew I was among my own people.  

So I went to the restroom and was surprised to see a poster for the lecture I'll be giving hanging on the toilet door, next to posters for other arts-and-culture events around town, and, significantly, posters for charity events for Syrian refugees. It is hard to explain what this lecture I'm giving is about, or what it is for, but at that moment I felt a sharp pang of shame at the way I move through the world, going around and making frivolous gestures in places that have no room for frivolity. In more hopeful moments I like to think of the project as aimed at the preservation and promotion of beauty, of sweetness and light, in a world that threatens to extinguish these altogether, and thus I like to imagine that the real urgency is to bring the frivolity, the ars gratia artis, precisely to the corners of the world where the darkness encroaches most. It is important and necessary, I tell myself. Ars gratia artis, too, is political. So I tell the other people waiting to get into the bathroom that the poster on the door is advertising a talk by yours truly, and they seem to think this is laudable, not shameful. They have the right kind of beards. 

 

The next morning I go out walking along the corniche with a friend who lives here, and she tells us that in the past Hezbollah supporters would drive by and throw acid at women who wear revealing clothes. She is wearing yoga pants and some sort of halter top. I look at her nervously. Would you mind covering your shoulders? I say. 

 

We walk past the rocks where men congregate to sunbathe together free of the company of women, calling each other habibi and showing off their bodies. 'Hi mister', some of them yell up to me from the rocks. Two massive Lebanese beefcakes stroll down the corniche with their shirts off, slowly, exhibitionists arm in arm. Another man comes up to me and asks me what time it is in French. I tell him, he reaches out his hand to shake mine, grabs it hard, says 'I love you', and makes a kissing sound. A woman in Ray Bans with old-fashioned Walkman headphones and three sequined hula hoops twirling around her fat waist comes rumbling past, a grotesque juggernaut of individualism. A bench full of women with headscarves watch her with blank stares. A small girl in these women's collective care gawks at the hula hoops in amazement. One of the women notices, and covers the girls eyes with her hand.

 

There are men more terrible still than the beard-enforcers of Hezbollah. ISIS is said to be preparing for a siege of Christian towns close to the Syrian border. Lebanese Hezbollah is committed to joining with the state security forces to ensure that that does not happen. Compared to ISIS, everyone looks like a friend, even the ones who hate seeing bare shoulders. 

 

You can go to a bar and you can give a frivolous lecture and you can hula hoop along the Mediterranean, but through all of this Syria looms: Assad, ISIS, and most of all the refugees. This looming is not new: less than ten years after the final withdrawal of Syrian troops after a three-decade occupation of Lebanon, the country to the east and north collapsed into total war and came to beat out even Iraq in our collective imagination as the most troubled place on earth. There is still a crater in the heart of Lebanon where, in 2005, someone, probably under orders from Assad, killed Rafic Hariri, and 22 other people along with him, with 1800 tons of TNT. 

 

Refugee women from Syrian villages show up in Lebanese camps covered head-to-toe. One can't help but think that's a good strategy: keep from encountering le visage de l'autri, and nothing can go too wrong. But here in Beirut one sees more women's faces covered with bandages, with blackened eyes, sitting waiting for black SUV's to take them back and forth to the hospitals for further increments of their ongoing plastic-surgery regimes. Beirut is said to be the Botox and nose-job capital of the Middle East, and the secular Lebanese rich will tell you that maintaining the face is no more vain than combing out and styling unkempt hair. And one senses, here, that it is not vanity, but the natural and inevitable complement to the concealment of women's faces demanded by the religious poor.

 

The Phalangist Christians who sided with Israel to exact so much pain from their enemies during the Lebanese civil war held to an ideology of 'Phoenicianism', which says that the Levantines are not primordially or deeply Arab, but trace their ancestry back to the Biblical Phoenicians. Like the Botox is to the niqab, Phoenicianism seems the natural opposite of, and complement to, pan-Arabism, to the idea that there is, or that there can be made to be, a homogeneous people from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf. Local particularism is good, it seems to me, as is recognition of transregional commonalities. Discretion with one's face is good too, as are lush and youthful lips. So many good ideas here, yet so much violence. 

 

I keep recalling a joke I heard long before I was old enough to understand it:

 

Why did Begin besiege Beirut?

 

To impress Jodie Foster.

 

In 1982 I didn't spend my days glued to a newsfeed (I wouldn't have even if such a thing existed), I had no idea who John Hinckley was, and what struck me most about the joke was simply the alliteration of B's. But it turns out the joke is actually about the futility and insanity of war. Jodie Foster, whoever she turns out to be, will never be sufficiently impressed.

For a Non-Ideal Metaphysics

A great many of the features of human existence --the fact that we are haunted by dead ancestors; that the soil is made up of the rotting bodies of living creatures like and including ourselves; that there is not just a question of whether we are bodies, souls, or body-soul compounds, but also of how different parts or regions of our bodies represent different dimensions of what we take to be ourselves; that we live through cycles of night and day and different things seem possible at different moments of these cycles-- are habitually left out of the accounts of human existence offered by philosophy. The great victory of philosophy, in fact, is often held to be that we have got down to the very most basic structure or framework of human existence, from the perspective of which our earth-boundness, or our bipedality, or our diurnality, come to appear contingent. We take space and time as such to be pure forms of intuition, but not the past of the ancestors or the heavenly realm of the angels.

For much of the history of philosophy, the basic orientating points of reference that gave life and sense to human thought were considered alongside the very most abstract frameworks that, one hoped, made this life and sense possible: not just the moral law within, but also the starry heavens above. Aristotle and Kant both, who gave us the most influential categorial schemes, also considered it an integral part of their projects to describe the rich diversity of things given in experience to which these categories apply. Leibniz's entire philosophical project, in turn, might be described as an attempt to show, once the austere metaphysical scaffold has been established, how we get the rich variety of bodily, world-bound experience we do.

But something has gone wrong along the way. These days it is not unusual to hear philosophers saying that it is their goal to give an account of human beings at a level that need not implicate their bodily existence, that abstracts away from the complicating features of world-bound life. I have heard Robert Brandom, for example, saying precisely this about the programmatic uses to which he was putting Leibniz and Spinoza in his ironically titled book, Tales of the Mighty Dead.

It seems much more likely that what permits us to neglect many of what were until extremely recently the basic features of human life is not so much a triumph of abstraction as a triumph of technology: the day-night rhythm, for example, seems less a defining fact about human existence in an era in which we can turn the lights on whenever we wish. It is not clear, however, how quickly a new invention frees us of the old dispositions of mind. We are still afraid of the dark, and we still dream of predating animals. In this respect, the new technology does not so much free us from an old obstacle to thinking about human existence in its pure state, so much as it throws up a new one.

The problem here is not that philosophers are slicing off just one part of the intellectual project of explaining human beings, and that I personally have no taste for that part. The problem is that what we get when we analyze human beings at that level is quite plainly not a model of human beings at all. There is a great deal that philosophers have taken to be eliminable that is not in fact eliminable. There is no meaningful concept of time for example that is not wrapped up with growth and death and aging, and thus that is not mediated by all sorts of rich, if culturally specific, beliefs about society. There is no meaningful concept of space that does not involve positive and negative valuations, psychogeographical projections-- a frightening forest here, a bad neighborhood there, a great sublime ocean between us.

It is not that I want us to apprehend the world in this way, and am wistful about what philosophy has moved away from. It is that we in fact do apprehend the world this way-- perhaps not exactly in the way I've explained, but still in some way that is comparable. We are in fact constrained to apprehend the world as an inhabited, enchanted whorl of beings and forces and vibes good and bad, surely as a result of the way our cognitive apparatus has evolved, but surely no less vividly for that. Yet for the most part philosophy doesn't care.

A very telling example of the dismissive approach to the sort of ineliminable dimensions of human existence I am stressing is Dan Dennett's account of why we continue to fear ghosts and ghouls when we, say, enter a dark attic. It is, Dennett explains, because our brains have evolved into 'hyperactive intentionality detection devices'. Dennett is certainly correct on this point, but the interpretation of what we should do in light of it is just the opposite of what I am suggesting. Dennett believes that empirical science and critical thinking can correct the brain's hyperactivity, and that once we have established what is really there, in the attic, we can move on. The final account of what is there will include only the entities of natural science, and all the products of that earlier hyperactivity will be confined to the history books.

But is the list of these entities really the most useful account we can give of the phenomenology of being-in-dark-attics? Even if we are all committed to a 'just the facts' approach, might not the facts about the particular character of the hyperactive brain's phantasms --that they, say, produce pale dead girls in one time and place, dark old men in another--, be just as relevant to the final description the human sciences would want to give as the list of physical entities present will be to the final description offered by natural science? At issue here, ultimately, is the philosophical question of what counts as a fact, and what I am trying to do is to press for an answer as to why it should be natural science that gets to determine, for philosophy, the answer. To pursue such questions is not to abandon science as a final arbiter, but simply to acknowledge what even the most heavy-handed 20th-century philosophers of science were prepared to recognize: that different levels of description are relevant for different tasks.

It is worth noting en passant that philosophers today are only prepared to scrap those products of evolved hyperactivity that it is socially feasible and morally expedient to scrap: out with the angels and poltergeists and God; but don't worry, no one is going to come for your selfhood, or your private property, or your mid-sized physical objects, or your love. Of course these can be analyzed away too, if the mood hits us, but for the most part we will agree to keep them around, and even to theorize about them. One era's specters to be shooed away are another era's indispensable building blocks of social reality.

Cognitive science, and the philosophy influenced by it, has taken into account the richness I've been trying to evoke-- that we are not just essentially thinking things, but also thinking things with, for example, a special evolved capacity to notice faces that appear in our natural landscape, and to have stronger reactions to them than to lumps of dirt. But cognitive science by itself is ill-equipped to draw out the full significance of the ineliminable features of human cognition that it registers and describes. Philosophers in other areas of specialization need to join the project.

Many in political philosophy are now, promisingly, expressing dissatisfaction with the ideal theory of figures such as Rawls, and pushing for the opening up of this field to marginalized perspectives, which necessarily give a non-ideal picture of things, while revealing that Rawls's abstract and ideal subject was to a great extent a mirror image of himself all along. What this new group of political philosophers seem not to have recognized, yet, is that opening up the field to non-ideal perspectives might not stop, and has no sufficient reason to stop, at the work of feminists or race theorists, who, however much is staked on their difference from Rawls and the others, are still engaging with the classical canon, taking it seriously, defining themselves in relation to it.

There are dimensions of difference undreamt of in non-ideal political theory. These are discovered, among other places, in ethnographic field work, in listening to people who do not set themselves up in society as theorists, who not only do not oppose the preeminence of Rawls but have no idea who he is, as they tell you their conception of the nature and sources of power or community. Those who are opening up political philosophy to include non-ideal theory still expect that we will be getting all of our ideas about the political from theorists of some sort or other, and that as such it is theory rather than expressions of culture that is of final interest to us. 

In the 20th century, Ernst Cassirer attempted to keep philosophy focused on culture, took it as one of the central tasks of philosophy to focus its unifying lens on the diversity of human cultural expressions. Ernest Gellner had a similar interest, but drifted further from his starting point in philosophy in order to reestablish himself as a fieldworking anthropologist. Aby Warburg and many other thinkers with a rigorous background in philosophy took it as their task, in one way or another, to give an account of the manifold expressions of culture, and of the logic or structure or sense behind them. This philosophical interest in culture was almost without exception the product of a distinctly mitteleuropäische form of culturedness: mostly German-Jewish and as such the descendants of the Berliner Aufklärung, reverent toward the beautiful things, and capacious enough in its conception of philosophy to work these things into the project of philosophy proper. 

There are no philosophers continuing this tradition today, and the sensibility for which they spoke is by now as extinct as the dodo. There are philosophers who engage with what is called 'cultural studies', but the second part of this label, here as elsewhere, implies that those working in this vein have not come to revere, but to break down: they pass straight from ignorance to critique, and have none of the cultivated, encyclopedic, second-nature familiarity with the kaleidoscopic variety of human cultural expressions that enabled the likes of Aby Warburg to speculate, say, on the meaning of the serpent motif in Navajo tapestry. Cultural-studies adepts wish to defend or promote the cultures with which they have some elective or genealogical affinity. But this is something very different from the lost tradition I am evoking. As an object of study, today, philosophers do not care about culture. 

Cognitive scientists and political philosophers are opening things up, a bit, but they remain largely indifferent to those ingredients of human existence that I think need to be taken into account in order to get any kind of rich picture of what it is, so to speak, we're really up to: myth, lore, ritual, tapestry motifs, dirty jokes, and other collective phantasms, all studied from a comparative and diachronic perspective.  These are, typically, the subject matter of anthropology, and for the most part my philosophy peers look at me like I am stoned when I attempt to argue for their importance. Philosophy does make occasional rather tame gestures toward interdisciplinarity-- psychology and economics are the preferred neighbor disciplines. Like philosophy, these are fields whose members, for their own complicated reasons, chaff at the suggestion that they are involved in 'mere' human sciences, and long for the respectability hard science provides. For any discipline with these aspirations, getting caught mingling with cultural anthropology could only constitute a setback. 

Historians of philosophy, for their part, continue to study their canonical figures as if these figures were working with a conception of philosophy as etiolated as their own. But Aristotle and Leibniz and Kant were doing anthropology too. One of the most serious setbacks to philosophy was the separation from it, by a sort of parthenogenesis, of anthropology over the course of the 19th century. One of the most hopeful prospects right now, the boons of which cognitive science has only begun to suggest, is their future reunification. A philosophy that, as part of the study of, say, space and time, gives rich, deep descriptions of the culture-bound experience of space and time by people who are not philosophers, who tell us of the souls below the earth or of the age when humans could still speak with animals: that would be a comprehensive human science.

If it fails to happen, this will be because philosophers continue to balk at the suggestion that their discipline is a human science at all. It is housed with the humanities, but only because they had to put it somewhere. And at least with respect to what it has become, they are right: philosophy is no longer a human science, since it does not study human beings. 

(Excerpt from a forthcoming essay.)

Europa

One day I'm sitting in a rented SUV in a traffic jam, near yet far from LaGuardia, listening to NPR. Some harmless duffer, probably wearing a bowtie and a Yankees cap, is waxing sentimental about the great baseball stadiums of yore. I get in a plane and the next day I'm back in France and the taxi driver is listening to France Culture. Some professor is on, talking about Maurice Blanchot, who suspects that what we all really want, deep down, is to get spanked.

So I'm back in France. I came out of the airplane into a gauntlet of ads from HSBC, the ones asking you to imagine what banking is going to be like in the future. Whenever I see them I imagine how they will look --sorry, how they would look-- sticking out of post-apocalyptic rubble.

Really, I'm sorry. Elif Batuman has announced that we've exited the age of irony and have entered the age of awkwardness. Oy, Elif, I just can't keep up with all the ages, and I suppose that in itself is a prescription for countless awkward encounters. Anyhow I'm still dwelling on how ironic, not awkward, all the feverish proclamations of capitalism triumphant are going to look someday.

Now I'm back home, back in Europe. Where? When I got my French cellphone contract they told me I would have to call for a special forfait prior to any trips to North America, but they assured me I could use it anywhere in 'Europe'. This sounded strange, and ill-defined. I asked if I could use it in Romania. Yes, of course, the agent replied. Bulgaria? Yes. Croatia? I think so. Montenegro? Um. Moldova? Uh. Chechnya? No, definitely not. The poor young man was laughing, and a bit annoyed, but he got my point. Europe's vagueness is intrinsic to its constitution. This is what makes the E.U. so hard to transform into a political reality. It is not that it is 'porous', or that its boundaries are not secure, but rather that there is a vast region that is itself a great, planar boundary zone. It is, perhaps, that part of Europe that puts carpets on its walls, or the part that has a historical memory of Mongol or Turkic reigns. Except that for any attempt to define it, one can always come forth with a compelling reason to move 'it' a bit further west.

It is significant, more significant than anyone has appreciated since the Pax Americana settled over Western Europe in 1945, that during the war 'Hun' had served as a catch-all insult for Germans and Japanese alike (and implicitly, though this created a bit of a problem in accounting for the allied Russians, for everyone in between). A 'Hun' is a Eurasian, which up until the end of World War II included everyone from the Pacific coast all the way to Mitteleuropa. After the war, Germany was split, and the DDR fell into the sphere of influence of the Soviets. Tales are numerous of babies with demi-Mongolian features cropping up all over Berlin around, let's see, midwinter, 1946. I recall many people, among them my father, crossing Checkpoint Charlie in the mid-1980s and reporting back that the soldiers patrolling the streets of East Berlin were 'Central Asian' or 'Mongolian' (read 'Hunnic') in appearance. This commonplace endures. Thus Tim Judah, filing for the New York Review of Books from Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine, writes: "The tanks looked relatively modern. As they pulled away, a man whose head was sticking out of the hatch at the top of a tank waved at us. His features were central Asian." Judah is telling the truth, of course, but he is also playing on an ancient fear about the identity of Europe, one that seems little changed since Batu Khan's hordes faced Yuri II of Vladimir in 1237.

The Russians, many recently realigned Eastern Europeans now think, are the true descendants of the Mongol Horde. They bring the soldiers with the Asiatic physiognomies. This is what determines where the absolute boundaries must be drawn. This is what motivates Obama's speechwriters to write that "the defense of Tallinn and Riga and Vilnius is just as important as the defense of Berlin and Paris and London." This is what brings NATO forward with its righteous Hollywood teleology, and this is what makes Putin puff out his chest and insist upon his terrible counter-history, his hordic revenge. 

When I was studying in Leningrad a quarter-century ago, there was much hand-wringing about the identity of Russia, and its place in a changing world. "Are we European, or are we Asian?" This struck me as a childish, pointless question. Now I see it is a gravely important one, so important that the very future of the world may hang on its satisfactory resolution. That there is no real answer, that no amount of scrutiny of maps or of soil, or measurement of lines of latitude or of magnetic variation, could possibly resolve the question, can only make it all the more disconcerting that ICBMs are involved. 

But I love Europe: I need to be in the place that is being fought over. That was always the attraction of Berlin, whatever the idiot youngsters are saying about that city today, about its 'urban spaces' and 'creative redesigns'.

When I was growing up on a defunct chicken farm in the central valley of California, there was a great barn out back in which someone had dumped thousands of books. They were covered in chicken shit, and they were the first books that truly provoked my imagination, made me a bibliophile... a coprobibliophile. Most of them would have been shit even without the shit: large-print Reader's Digest versions of the classics, wit and wisdom from Lady Bird Johnson, the 1971 AAA guide to the motor inns of Utah, etc. But there was one book that stuck out, that demanded to be cleaned off and studied: it was, I think, a 1975 statistical report of the Bundesministerium für Ernährung, Landwirtschaft und Forsten concerning the number of hectares of uncultivated forest in the Federal Republic of Germany. The key thing is that it was in German, and for me to find it there was a highly improbably sort of magic. I took it inside and treated it like a holy text, and opened it up and marveled at its impossibly long words, and at the thought that these words could actually have a meaning. Everything I've ever done since has been an attempt to unravel that meaning, and others like it. 

But still, there is America, and what I love most about living in Europe, perhaps, is that I can now experience the continent of my birth with a similar sense of marvel and strangeness to the one with which I had so long experienced the continent of my ancestry. I can go there, to New Jersey, say, and I can feel the autumn beginning to set in, and I can feel, sharply, the great violence that made New Jersey possible, and the millennia that preceded it too. Or at least I think I can. Anyhow I feel estranged, in the proper sense: made into an étranger.

It is significant that one of the founding myths of the continent on which I currently find myself has to do with the rape of a Phoenician woman. Alternative translations will tell you that we should understand this 'rape' rather as a ravishment, or, seemingly much more innocuously, as an abduction. Yet we mustn't exaggerate the difference of connotation. One of the core features of Eurasian folk culture, spreading from the Adriatic Sea to Eastern Turkestan, is the idea that marriage is itself a rape or ravishment or taking-away for the purpose of non-consensual sex. This transgression must be enacted, if only ritualistically, in the wedding celebration. The family, with its recently discovered 'values', is a product of unspeakable violence. This is the anthropology of kinship, in Europe as in Asia. This is the story that gives Europe its name. 

Notes from Far Muscovy

I dreamt last night that I was sharing a taxi with Putin from Moscow to Sheremetyevo airport. He was being very friendly and I could tell he liked me. I felt like a coward and a moral cretin for not saying anything critical that would cause him to not like me, and at the same time I kept trying to convince myself that there were strong pragmatic reasons for maintaining good relations, at least for now, as this would enable me to eventually write more revealingly about him. I knew this was bullshit, however, and that I was really just a grovelling sycophantic underling who craved the approval of people in power. Then we got into a massive traffic jam, and I was so filled with self-hatred and dread that I woke up. 

In real life I had shared a taxi from Moscow to Sheremetyevo, earlier that same day, with a kind, gentle, architect from Berlin. By 'architect' I mean one of those people from Berlin who talks about 'space' a lot and who participates in panels with philosophers. He has probably never built any buildings, but nor has he blown any up, which is why I am wondering why he got replaced by Putin in my dream.

We had been, earlier in the day, on a panel in front of a few hundred people and a number of angry journalists. We were a motley crew of philosophers and political activists, and to be perfectly honest my reason for accepting the invitation was somewhat disingenuous: it meant an opportunity to go back to Russia after what seems like a lifetime away.

Anyhow there were seething antagonistic dynamics between different parties in the room that I could not even begin to decipher. There was a guy on the panel who looked like a skateboarder but announced himself as a psychoanalyst. There were plenty of the sort of bearded, long-haired Russian men who could be either dissident leftists or ultranationalist Orthodox spiritualists. Many of the people in the room clearly had cults of personality attached to them, but I did not know who they were or in virtue of what the cults had congealed.

There was much talk, more than any westerner could possibly anticipate, of Ukraine, and of popular will, and revolution.

When it came time for questions a man in the audience stood up and said, "I am a doctor of philosophy. First of all, I would like to begin by asking you all to express solidarity with the protesters in Kiev. Long live the Ukrainian Revolution! Long live Maidan!" He held up his fist and yelled "Long live Maidan!" again, and then I and maybe a dozen other people did the same. (Why not? I thought. I too support Maidan.) Then there was an awkward silence, and the journalists were all glancing around to see who expressed solidarity and who kept silent. Would there be repercussions? I wondered.

And then the 'doctor of philosophy' said (to paraphrase): "All you so-called philosophers ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You haven't even mentioned morality once. And that's what philosophers need to be talking about: morality. Here we are in a world where all sorts of unnatural things are happening: capitalism, genetic engineering, same-sex marriage, drugs, and so on. How are we going to put a stop to these things if we don't start taking morality seriously?" 

For some reason they decided to pass the microphone to me. My Russian skills, often inaccessible during this short visit, snapped to attention, and I said: "As far as I am concerned it is the sole duty of a philosopher to compare different systems of morality, to attempt to find their weaknesses and inconsistencies, but by no means to defend the one or the other." There was much muttering and nonplussedness. 

What are the lessons I am drawing? For one thing, I return convinced more than ever that Russia is far more foreign than westerners are willing to recognize. On this visit I heard, on multiple occasions and from people of all political orientations, the expression of a contrast between 'us' and 'Europe'. In the Soviet period and much earlier, the eternal question was whether 'we' are European or Asian, whereas now there seems to be a resolute and unconflicted commitment to the role of a tertium quid. At the same time, Moscow is indeed clearly more 'Asiatic' than it was 20 years ago, as a result of migration patterns from Central Asia. Restaurant wait-staff, construction workers, and others closer to the bottom of the social ladder are, it seems, far more likely to be named Chingiz than Sergei. One is reminded of how much of the current territory of Russia --not the former USSR, but Russia-- was once covered by khanates.

But the lessons, the lessons. There is a place in the world where same-sex marriage can be plausibly lumped together with GMO's as a sign of a world gone wrong, and indeed as a sign of excessive American power. One disagrees, but still wishes to rub one's western liberal academic friends' faces in it a bit: try to fit this into your pat schemes, into your Facebook echo chambers of mutually assured agreement. 

One of the most intense preoccupations of western social media over the past few months is the question how, in spite of the fact that Russia is so terribly homophobic, nonetheless Russian men, and particularly Putin, look so hopelessly gay. The country's leader goes horseback riding with his shirt off, and does so in defense of a purportedly rigorously heteronormative conception of masculinity. What on earth is going on here? It seems to me that there is something even far deeper than homophobia that marks the distance between Russia and the west in these matters, and that is a different relationship to irony, of which, I take it, the 'camp' so lucidly analyzed by Susan Sontag is but a subspecies. In the west it is impossible to simply be a man in the way Russians such as Putin take for granted, since the gestures or styles in which this would consist are continually being taken up by people who would like to subvert, invert, or at least question the process by which something so minor as gestures or styles could ever constitute something so fundamental as identity. 

Putin is purportedly a hardbody (if by now tending toward gynecomastia, and really more thick than hard), but his authoritarianism is soft. For comparison, a fascinating list has been circulating of western bands prohibited by Soviet authorities in 1984. Number 1 is 'German-Polish Aggression', which is almost certainly made up. Number 2 is 'German-American Friendship', by which I assume they mean Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft or DAF, which really existed but had nothing to do with the Marshall Plan or geopolitics. Numbers 3-14 are Soviet 'Red Wave' bands (except for one Czech group), and it's not at all surprising to see them on a government blacklist. Then, suddenly, at 15 we get Blue Öyster Cult followed by a number of well-known western groups. The list is fairly clearly composed by clueless government agents, filled with misspellings and misgroupings, e.g., number 44: 'Blondi and Debbia Kharri'. 'Dzhutas Prist', 'Depesh Med', 'Kalche Klub', 'Tokan Khedz' (i.e., Talking Heads), follow no known transliteration scheme. Julio Iglesias comes in at 45, two spots ahead of Black Sabbath, which strongly suggests the numbers are not ordinal. This list is really a nice measure of how much has changed: 'soft' authoritarianism of the sort Putin has perfected doesn't waste time with stuff like this.

And then comes glasnost: I remember, in 1991, seeing a USSR state-run Melodiya vinyl recording of Pearl Jam, released not under the name Пэрл Джем, but rather Жемчужное Варенье, literally, "Pearl Jam," i.e., fruit spread that is made out of pearls. So even with the official policy of openness the state proved as clueless as ever.

Lenin's name is now fading in the marble atop his mausoleum on Red Square. The opening hours have been reduced to 10h-13h weekdays, and apparently for Russian citizens only [Вход для граждан]. Of all former leaders, Lenin seems the hardest to fit into current narratives of national identity. Stalin fits very well, without having to be mentioned by name. The precise species of dictatorship Putin is crafting is definitely not a revolutionary one, of the proletariat, and it's not an omnipresent heavy-handed one either. The propaganda is unrelenting, but as long as you are a powerless nobody you're free to express dissenting opinions as much as you like. I held my fist up in support of the Maidan protestors, one of whose leaders, evidently, Putin recently caused to be tortured. This happened in front of TV cameras. Why didn't more people hold their fists up? Again, I don't know.

I did get 'controlled' for eating an apple while waiting on the metro platform at Revolution Square (a transgression of which I'm guilty in multiple jurisdictions), but when the police saw my American passport they congratulated me for the glorious victory of the US hockey team earlier that day (which was the first I'd heard of it). Instinctively, though, here more than anywhere else I've been, one perceives the police and other officials warily, sensing that protection and service are the furthest thing from their minds. Life as a visible ethnic or sexual minority here would be a life of constant fear.

Nadia and Masha, formerly of Pussy Riot, are out of their Siberian labor camps now, making the rounds of the Colbert Report, Brooklyn, destinations they are surely being drilled to understand. The Guardian recently published an anonymous missive from remaining members of the Pussy Riot collective, disavowing these two for their association with the establishment, and in particular for speaking out in favor of mainstream prisoners' rights groups. One somewhat hopes to see next a super-hardcore faction denouncing these anonymous posers for publishing in the Guardian. I don't care what anyone says. Nadia Tolokonnikova is our era's Aleksandr Radishchev. 

I have no patience for westerners who say it is not our place to criticize the Russian regime. I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'we'. I certainly don't see myself in that deployment of the first-person plural pronoun.

I had a friend who spent much of the 1980s in Soviet jails for the crime of circulating bootleg Beatles tapes. He fell off a building and died, drunk, during the 1991 Generals' Putch. His name was Vitaliy Dergachev. I'm on his side.

Western pseudo-left collusionism reached a fever pitch during the Olympics, which just happened to coincide with my recent return to Russia. The respected Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen, whom I heard speak in the 1990s and I admired very much, wrote recently in The Nation that we are all, essentially, being duped by a lazy western media that is prepared to say more or less anything to make Putin look bad. But if it is true, as Cohen insists, that coverage of Russia is even less subtle than in the Soviet days, this surely follows from the far more general fact of the media's overall decline in the past quarter century, and not from any deepening of the western media's Cold War parti pris. 

Cohen maintains that we are naive for going along with the official western line that the Ukrainians 'yearn to be free' and that this automatically means geopolitical alliance with the EU rather than with Russia. He evokes ancestrality: the bloody argument that Rus' was once Kievan, and --therefore?-- that Kiev must remain, if not Russian, then at least Russia-oriented. But this entirely overlooks the fact that the Maidan protesters do not think of themselves as dupes of the CIA or of western propaganda. They are disgusted by corruption and behind-the-scenes manipulation, mostly guided by Russia, and they want to be free of it. What is even more important, this overlooks the fact that almost all dissident Russian progressives (and not just the category-defying fish-fowl who simultaneously oppose gay marriage and GMO's) are in strong solidarity with the Ukrainian protesters: not because they are западник suckers, not because they are pro-western, but because they want Ukraine to realize its right to autonomy and self-determination. As my friend Kirill Medvedev, a prominent figure in the Russian New Left, writes:

Извините, если что, но я совершенно серьезно думаю, что все прогрессивное человечество должно требовать сейчас двух вещей а)официально двуязычная, двуэтничная, мультикультурная Украина б)полное прекращение вмешательства России в дела этой страны. 

Sorry, but I completely seriously think that all progressive humanity should now demand two things: (a) an officially bilingual, bi-ethnic, multicultural Ukraine; (b) the total cessation of interference on the part of Russia in the affairs of that country. 

I'm on Kirill's side.

What now about the Olympics? I agree that much of the western snickering and bickering about Sochi has been petty and embarrassing. I have been many places in Eastern Europe where a sign requested that I throw my toilet paper into the waste-paper receptacle, and not, as one might expect, into the toilet. When you travel, you see new things, and you marvel at the variety of the world. When you see them circulating on Tumblr, they're easier to ridicule.

But let us make no mistake: Sochi was an ugly travesty, and it was made possible only by tremendous suffering. Forget about the repression of gays and lesbians, for a moment. In Moscow in the Winter of 2014, two sights are ubiquitous: the Olympic games on giant screens lining public thoroughfares; and migrant laborers from the Caucasus being treated like dirt. A racial hierarchy has emerged over the past two decades in the capital city, where Central Asians are now the tolerated, unthreatening, hard-working minority, while Caucasians occupy the very bottom rung of the social ladder, and are by definition targets of suspicion and exclusion.

Who are the Caucasians, and what is the historical cause of their place in the ethnic hierarchy of Russia? One thing you might notice is that Sochi is located in a region called 'Krasnodar'. It is surrounded by many other administrative divisions that end in -stan, suggesting a Tataro-Turkic influence, and many other divisions that bear some sort of local ethnonym: Ingushetia, Ossetia, etc. Why is Krasnodar not a -stan? Why is Krasnodar not called Adyghia? The answer has in part to do with the fact that it was Russified in the mid-19th century through a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Circassians were exterminated, or relocated to Turkey. There is still today an active political lobby, based in Turkey, pushing for greater recognition of the Circassian genocide, but its voice is of course muffled by the Olympic juggernaut. In the lead-up to the games, Russian security forces were blowing up family homes around the Krasnodar region, hoping to weed out terrorists who had threatened to make the olympic spectacle their own.

The Americans were worried they'd need to be evacuated in the event of a terrorist attack, but the event of a non-event is, on reflection, no less troubling: a flawless Olympics means, for Putin, the consolidation of symbolic power in a contested part of the Caucasus, power that has seemed perpetually out of reach since at least the early 19th century. The westerners go and have a good time, tell themselves Putin's not so bad after all even if they were made to shit in adjoining toilets at the Black Sea base camp. And brute power wins with the complicity of tacky pageant, and of a grovelling and sycophantic western left, whose best arguments for Putin never amount to anything more than a simple change of subject: Well, they say, it's no worse than what we do. 

Against Gopnikism

In my outline yesterday of the malady of Gopnikism in American writing on France, I omitted to mention what must be the all-time champion of the genre, indeed a strong contender for the title of most frivolous article in the history of journalism. I am speaking of Elaine Sciolino's 'Letter from Paris' in the New York Times of September 21, 2013, "Trendy Green Mystifies France. It's a Job for the Kale Crusader!" The article describes that chapter of the life of American Kristen Beddard after she has quit her job "as an Ogilvy & Mather account manager in New York to follow her husband to Paris." One night, out in a Paris restaurant with her husband-leader, an angel descended unto her, and caused her to say: "What if I try to bring kale to Paris?"

This is the 'spunky', rule-breaking offshoot of the august tradition of American fawning over French cuisine. I have never understood any of this (I'm with Foucault: "a good club sandwich with a Coke" is just fine for me), and so I'm hardly positioned to be bouleversé by the report of this American ingenue's failure to curtsey at the court of indigenous crudities. I couldn't care less what the French think of kale. I couldn't care less if Beddard fails in her life's mission. What interests me most here is what Sciolino's article reveals about the conventions for American writing on France. The first rule of this genre is that one must assume at the outset that France --like America, in its own way-- is an absolutely exceptional place, with a timeless and unchanging and thoroughly authentic spirit. This authenticity is reflected par excellence in the French relation to food, which, as the subtitle of Adam Gopnik's now canonical book reminds us, stands synecdochically for family, and therefore implicitly also for nation.

France, in other words, is a country that invites ignorant Americans, under cover of apolitical vacationing, of living 'the good life' and of cultivating their faculty of taste, to unwittingly indulge their fantasies of blood-and-soil ideology. You'll say I'm exaggerating, but I mean exactly what I say. From M.F.K. Fisher's Francocentric judgment that jalapeños are for undisciplined peoples stuck in the childhood of humanity, to Gopnik's celebration of Gallic commensality as the tie that binds family and country, French soil has long been portrayed by Americans as uniquely suited for the production of people with the right kind of values. This is dangerous stuff. The longer I'm here, in fact, and the more rhetoric I hear about terroir, the more I'm convinced that preoccupation with this intangible spiritual value directly tracks the cycles of far-right politics in France. This would put people like José Bové closer to Marine Le Pen than most are prepared to see, but, well, the world is a complicated place. I feel like saying to both of these characters, and to Fisher and Gopnik too: we internationalists, we eat while we walk.

In this scheme, Beddard is another Carrie Bradshaw, who gets icy scowls when she enters the Chanel store, but never for a moment doubts that Chanel sets the standards of vestimentation, and anyway she can always stumble back out into the succorous American arms of Mr. Big. In food as in fashion, it is only in front of their countrymen that the Americans' sampling of French authenticity ever had any meaning anyway. But even so it helps to maintain and legitimate the rigid system of cultural chauvinism within France, to ensure that any aspect of culture filtering in from the former colonies will continue to be seen as peculiar, as acceptable for cautious sampling by adults, but never as simply an expression of human culture alongside other such expressions, including those that first evolved in this portion of the western part of the western peninsula of Eurasia.

This sort of sampling, I think, was the logic behind the supposed racial harmony of Paris at the height of the jazz age. Yes, Josephine Baker (a.k.a. Joséphine Baker) was accepted here, and there were no laws requiring her to use the service entrance of the clubs she performed in. But her acceptance was largely conditional on her willingness to wear a banana skirt and to embody the unhinged spirit of the age. Staid and non-famous African-Americans would not have had nearly as warm a reception. In the same era, French intellectuals and artists were fetishizing West African masks and costumes, not in the name of cultural equity (in Alan Lomax's sense), but as inspiration for the imagined rediscovery, within limits, of the irrational in European civilization. They were engaged, in short, in a variety of slumming.

With the recent recrudescence of vicious nativism throughout Europe, it is getting harder to achieve even this level of multicultural hybridity. Not long ago in Italy, there was a town that passed an ordinance, filled with slow-food-style rhetoric, outlawing, no, not McDonalds, but... döner kebap, falafel, and like threats to cultural integrity. The celebrants of terroir and locavorism are of course not themselves fascists, but this does not mean there cannot be an easy elision between some of the legitimate concerns of these good solid 'liberals', on the one hand, and people with concerns about völkisch authenticity on the other. When such things happen in Germany, the world is ready to recognize them for what they really are (the German for terroir is Boden, a term not many people would invoke these days to praise what is good in German culture). When they happen in France or Italy, the priming we have received from M.F.K. Fisher and Adam Gopnik enables us to write it off as a righteous defense of the good life. Which is to say the life Americans would like to sample on their apolitical European vacations. 

Document: June 21, 1994

I'm back in Montreal for the holidays, going little by little, as I do in my free time, through the suitcases full of my private correspondences dating from roughly 1986 to 2001 (after which there is virtually no paper trail at all). I pulled out, at random, a letter I had somehow never noticed before, and I'm not quite sure how it came into my possession. I am not quite sure who wrote it either, nor to whom it was written. It is evidently someone I knew in California in the early 1990s, but nothing in it rings a bell.

I had had the intention of copying out a few extracts, simply in view of their remarkable testimony to the spirit of era, and only after I began the transcription did it dawn on me, with the aid of a bit of Googling, that this letter is even more interesting than I had at first supposed. It was written by a girlfriend, evidently at the tail end of her relationship, to a well-known alternative rock star, identified here only as 'R.'.  This R. was, in 1994, at the cusp of fame. I have decided to abbreviate names to protect anonymity. Astute readers might be able to identify R. nonetheless from the available clues.

Anyhow what interests me about it is the way a report from a fairly mediocre life (and the sort of life that is very familiar to me from that era) can end up, with time, to have a real archival value. Traces of lives are mundane when first left, but then their mundanity warps or rusts or ferments into historicity. And to think that this can happen even with scraps of paper I've been dragging around with me from city to city, as I myself warp and rust: astounding.

*

Hey Dude,

I started a letter to you weeks ago, but you know how that goes! I have 15 minutes now so I'll see what I can fit in. So fucking much has happened I don't know where to begin! I'll start where you left me in Jan. (with R. in my bed and E. on his way.) My life is a T.V. mini series! J. said (he is a character you have not met yet) going out with me is like being on "Hard Copy" or "A Current Affair"...  

J. is part owner of B. Café where I now work. He is a brilliant writer and has the best sense of humor since you and I. He is 30 which means he is very serious about relationships etc. He won't play games and has no tolerance for R.'s B.S. For 2 weeks J. and I had an incredible binge together. Xanax to crack and everything in between. We have some stories that we are lucky enough to live to tell. Don't tell anyone but I've been hanging out at the Viper Room (w/ Johnny Depp and all). Also J.'s best friend is married to Drew Barrymore. I am quite the Hollywood scenster [sic] now...

R.'s album was released on Tuesday on Geffen records. It was the #1 new added on college play lists. He is signing a publishing deal for another $175,000! (and he is still a cheap bastard). I love him so much! He is moving to Connecticut a week from now. We are both moping around depressed and we can't figure out why. We both just achieved huge life goals. My theory is that we love each other and we know we are going to have to be apart soon. We have spoken about marriage and my moving to New York but in an indirect sort of way. I don't know what to do!...

E. is insane! He calls and threatens to do something to my grandparents if I don't pay him. Yikes. He is so gross. My judgement about guys has been so lame. I worry about myself. All the more reason to just settle down with R. At least he is sane...

The death of Kurt Cobain hit us all pretty hard. It still freaks me out. I wish he could have held on to the strength of his creativity to survive instead of letting it drive him over the edge. I'm sure all the drugs did not help. It is so depressing especially when I think that I try to help heal people who are depressed with their creativity. I was hanging w/ J. about the time Kurt offed himself. That marks the beginning of our binge, we couldn't take the grief. We felt all his pain and J. insisted that he was possessed by the spirit of Kurt Cobain as we laughed our way through those crazy punk rock weeks...